Curt Doolittle

Theme: Truth

  • Philosophy: Continental Imaginative Literature(positive) Priests Vs Analytic Critical Law(negative) Judges


    [P]hilosophers function as intellectual police, detectives, judges, and sometimes executioners. Although I have had literary (nonsense) philosophers criticize me for the position, endlessly.

    If philosophy does not consist in the study of how to speak the truth by discovering how we avoid error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and deceit, then it is just fiction-writing that conflates religion, literature, and pseudoscience.

    Just as judges may discover general rules (natural law) by solving problems of conflict; and just as physicists discover general rules of determinism by solving problems of extending perception (physical laws); our philosophers discover general rules of reason (rational laws) by solving problems of error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience and deceit.

    Our function is to police the intellectual sphere for error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, pseudoscience, and deceit.

    I am not sure we can classify literary dreamers, hypothesizers, inventors as philosophers. We do. But they give us a bad name.

    This is the correct positioning of the philosophical disciplines. Aspirational Literary Religon and Critical Analytic Law.

    Curt Doolittle
    The Philosophy of Aristocracy
    The Propertarian Institute

  • Repositioning Economics, Sociology, Philosophy and Law

    [S]o today I have discussed repositioning economics as social science, and social science as pseudoscience. And repositioning philosophy as positive aspirational literature of rationalist priests, and negative critical law, of empirical judges. This mirrors the epistemological method of creative free association to arrive at hypothesis, and criticism to test theories in the hope of discovering laws from that survives. This mirrors the moral method of doing unto others as we would like done unto us(aspirational), and not doing unto others that which we would not want done unto us (critical). Economics is merely the method by which we voluntarily cooperate in order to accumulate and use the knowledge from all individuals across the reproductive spectrum. But it ignores the three roles of Negative force, neutral exchange, Positive advocacy. Ergo: Women’s Dreams, Brother’s Trades, Father’s Limits. Yin(female) and Yang(male) do not balance in static harmony. We move through time in a continuous process of discovery. It is this difference that separated static east from dynamic west. 

    Lover, warrior, judge, King  Queen, teacher, mother, lover.
..............................|
..............................V
................Brother, Partner, Maker, Trader......

    Not bad work to accomplish before lunch. 😉 Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

  • Repositioning Economics, Sociology, Philosophy and Law

    [S]o today I have discussed repositioning economics as social science, and social science as pseudoscience. And repositioning philosophy as positive aspirational literature of rationalist priests, and negative critical law, of empirical judges. This mirrors the epistemological method of creative free association to arrive at hypothesis, and criticism to test theories in the hope of discovering laws from that survives. This mirrors the moral method of doing unto others as we would like done unto us(aspirational), and not doing unto others that which we would not want done unto us (critical). Economics is merely the method by which we voluntarily cooperate in order to accumulate and use the knowledge from all individuals across the reproductive spectrum. But it ignores the three roles of Negative force, neutral exchange, Positive advocacy. Ergo: Women’s Dreams, Brother’s Trades, Father’s Limits. Yin(female) and Yang(male) do not balance in static harmony. We move through time in a continuous process of discovery. It is this difference that separated static east from dynamic west. 

    Lover, warrior, judge, King  Queen, teacher, mother, lover.
..............................|
..............................V
................Brother, Partner, Maker, Trader......

    Not bad work to accomplish before lunch. 😉 Curt Doolittle The Philosophy of Aristocracy The Propertarian Institute

  • cannot be given, they can only be discovered. Lawgiving is logically impossible.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-shall-we-ignore-any-human-law-state-king-president-judge-or-lawgiver/answer/Curt-Doolittle?share=37a5b2caLaws cannot be given, they can only be discovered.

    Lawgiving is logically impossible. One can issue commands. One can negotiate contractual provisions on your behalf. But one cannot create law, only command, legislation, regulation, and contractual provision.

    There is one natural law, that can be stated in the positive or negative, but must be stated as both positive and negative. (I’ve written too much on this today and don’t want to repeat myself, so I’m not going into detail.)

    Obverse: – The silver rule (Natural Law – the negative ) do not do unto others… etc.

    Reverse: – The golden rule (Natural Rights – the positive ) do unto others only what …. etc.

    There is only on moral law that these two rules are derived from:

    Obverse: – negative: impose no unwanted costs upon that which others have acted to create, obtain, and inventory, whether life, kin, mate, relation, property, norm, or institution.

    Reverse: – positive: limit your actions to productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, limited to externalities of the same criteria.

    In other words: “do no harm” is the one law of human cooperation. Because harm is what causes retaliation, breaks the peace, reduces trust, increases transaction and opportunity costs, and reduces the quality of life for everyone in the vicinity as a consequence.

    These laws are geographically, demographically, culturally, normatively, institutionally, traditionally, independent, and provide universal decidability in all matters of conflict, whether participants like it or not.

    What differs is the only the in-group contracts in the forms of property, laws, norms, traditions, institutions, territory and monuments. But within group this rule still applies.

    Ergo, you only listen to a command when its either in going to benefit you, or when ignoring or contradicting it will lead to your harm or punishment.

    Otherwise, there is no connection between commands and the only necessary laws: objective morality, natural law, and natural rights. Do no harm, seek no involuntary gain.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute

    Source date (UTC): 2016-08-17 15:36:00 UTC

  • Natural Law, Expanded by Doolittle

    (with updates by Doolittle) [N]atural Law – What is Law? Natural Law Natural Law is a broad and often misapplied term tossed around various schools of philosophy, science, history, theology, and law. Indeed, Immanuel Kant reminded us, ‘What is law?’ may be said to be about as embarrassing to the jurist as the well-know question ‘What is Truth?’ is to the logician. Law, in its generic sense, is a body of rules of action or conduct prescribed by controlling authority, and having binding legal force. That which must be obeyed and followed by citizens subject to sanctions or legal consequences is a law (Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 884). Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and how the law developed. Natural Law – A Moral Theory of Jurisprudence Natural Law is a moral theory of jurisprudence, which maintains that law should be based on morality and ethics. Natural Law holds that the law is based on what’s “correct.” Natural Law is “discovered” by humans through the use of reason and choosing between good and evil. Therefore, Natural Law finds its power in discovering certain universal standards in morality and ethics. Natural Law – The History The Greeks — Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle emphasized the distinction between “nature” (physis, φúσις) and “law,” “custom,” or “convention” (nomos, νóμος). What the law commanded varied from place to place, but what was “by nature” should be the same everywhere. Aristotle (BC 384—322) is considered by many to be the father of “natural law.” In Rhetoric, he argues that aside from “particular” laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a “common law” or “higher law” that is according to nature (Rhetoric 1373b2–8). The Stoics — The development of natural law theory continued in the Hellenistic school of philosophy, particularly with the Stoics. The Stoics pointed to the existence of a rational and purposeful order to the universe. The means by which a rational being lived in accordance with this cosmic order was considered natural law. Unlike Aristotle’s “higher law,” Stoic natural law was indifferent to the divine or natural source of that law. Stoic philosophy was very influential with Roman jurists such as Cicero, thus playing a significant role in the development of Roman legal theory. The Christians — Augustine (AD 354—430) equates natural law with man’s Pre-Fall state. Therefore, life according to nature is no longer possible and mankind must instead seek salvation through the divine law and Christ’s grace. Gratian (12th century) reconnected the concept of natural law and divine law. “The Human Race is ruled by two things: namely, natural law and usages (mos, moris, mores). Natural law is what is contained in the law and the Gospel. By it, each person is commanded to do to others what he wants done to himself and is prohibited from inflicting on others what he does not want done to himself.” (Decretum, D.1 d.a.c.1; ca. 1140 AD) — ADDED BY DOOLITTLE—- The Enlightenment Thinkers (AD 1600 – 2016) (Bacon/English, Locke/British, Jefferson/Anglo-German, Hayek/Austrian, Rothbard/Jewish, Hoppe/German, Doolittle/American. The attempt to mature Stoic, Roman, Germanic, and British empirical law into a formal logic wherein all rights are reduced to property rights, law is strictly constructed from the prohibition on the imposition of costs that would cause retaliation and increase the costs, risk, and likelihood of cooperation, that creates prosperity in a division of perception, cognition, knowledge, labor, and advocacy. In other words, natural law, evolved from empirical common law, as the formal category(property), logic (construction), empiricism(from observation), and science (continuous improvement) of human cooperation. In this view, ethics, morality, economics, law, politics constitute the science of cooperation: social science. Everything else is justification, advocacy, literature, and propaganda. — ADDED BY DOOLITTLE—- Natural Law – The Conclusion In the end, where does law come from? The Theory of Natural Law maintains that certain moral laws transcend time, culture, and government. There are universal standards that apply to all mankind throughout all time. These universal moral standards are inherent in and discoverable by all of us, and form the basis of a just society.

  • Natural Law, Expanded by Doolittle

    (with updates by Doolittle) [N]atural Law – What is Law? Natural Law Natural Law is a broad and often misapplied term tossed around various schools of philosophy, science, history, theology, and law. Indeed, Immanuel Kant reminded us, ‘What is law?’ may be said to be about as embarrassing to the jurist as the well-know question ‘What is Truth?’ is to the logician. Law, in its generic sense, is a body of rules of action or conduct prescribed by controlling authority, and having binding legal force. That which must be obeyed and followed by citizens subject to sanctions or legal consequences is a law (Black’s Law Dictionary, Sixth Edition, p. 884). Jurisprudence is the philosophy of law and how the law developed. Natural Law – A Moral Theory of Jurisprudence Natural Law is a moral theory of jurisprudence, which maintains that law should be based on morality and ethics. Natural Law holds that the law is based on what’s “correct.” Natural Law is “discovered” by humans through the use of reason and choosing between good and evil. Therefore, Natural Law finds its power in discovering certain universal standards in morality and ethics. Natural Law – The History The Greeks — Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle emphasized the distinction between “nature” (physis, φúσις) and “law,” “custom,” or “convention” (nomos, νóμος). What the law commanded varied from place to place, but what was “by nature” should be the same everywhere. Aristotle (BC 384—322) is considered by many to be the father of “natural law.” In Rhetoric, he argues that aside from “particular” laws that each people has set up for itself, there is a “common law” or “higher law” that is according to nature (Rhetoric 1373b2–8). The Stoics — The development of natural law theory continued in the Hellenistic school of philosophy, particularly with the Stoics. The Stoics pointed to the existence of a rational and purposeful order to the universe. The means by which a rational being lived in accordance with this cosmic order was considered natural law. Unlike Aristotle’s “higher law,” Stoic natural law was indifferent to the divine or natural source of that law. Stoic philosophy was very influential with Roman jurists such as Cicero, thus playing a significant role in the development of Roman legal theory. The Christians — Augustine (AD 354—430) equates natural law with man’s Pre-Fall state. Therefore, life according to nature is no longer possible and mankind must instead seek salvation through the divine law and Christ’s grace. Gratian (12th century) reconnected the concept of natural law and divine law. “The Human Race is ruled by two things: namely, natural law and usages (mos, moris, mores). Natural law is what is contained in the law and the Gospel. By it, each person is commanded to do to others what he wants done to himself and is prohibited from inflicting on others what he does not want done to himself.” (Decretum, D.1 d.a.c.1; ca. 1140 AD) — ADDED BY DOOLITTLE—- The Enlightenment Thinkers (AD 1600 – 2016) (Bacon/English, Locke/British, Jefferson/Anglo-German, Hayek/Austrian, Rothbard/Jewish, Hoppe/German, Doolittle/American. The attempt to mature Stoic, Roman, Germanic, and British empirical law into a formal logic wherein all rights are reduced to property rights, law is strictly constructed from the prohibition on the imposition of costs that would cause retaliation and increase the costs, risk, and likelihood of cooperation, that creates prosperity in a division of perception, cognition, knowledge, labor, and advocacy. In other words, natural law, evolved from empirical common law, as the formal category(property), logic (construction), empiricism(from observation), and science (continuous improvement) of human cooperation. In this view, ethics, morality, economics, law, politics constitute the science of cooperation: social science. Everything else is justification, advocacy, literature, and propaganda. — ADDED BY DOOLITTLE—- Natural Law – The Conclusion In the end, where does law come from? The Theory of Natural Law maintains that certain moral laws transcend time, culture, and government. There are universal standards that apply to all mankind throughout all time. These universal moral standards are inherent in and discoverable by all of us, and form the basis of a just society.

  • Methods of Criticism: Falsehood vs Theft

    [A] RATIONALIST INQUIRES FOR FALSEHOOD, A PROPERTARIAN INQUIRES FOR THEFT.

    In most arguments it is a given that they are false. Instead, seek not to prove the leftists false, but seek to prove them thieves.

    Then respond with, why are you not willing to trade with me? Why must you lie and steal from me?

  • Methods of Criticism: Falsehood vs Theft

    [A] RATIONALIST INQUIRES FOR FALSEHOOD, A PROPERTARIAN INQUIRES FOR THEFT.

    In most arguments it is a given that they are false. Instead, seek not to prove the leftists false, but seek to prove them thieves.

    Then respond with, why are you not willing to trade with me? Why must you lie and steal from me?

  • Q&A: Curt: What is Your Innovation on Popper in Epistemology, Science, and Truth?

    –“Curt, I believe I already know the answer to this, but believe it to be valuable to your general audience nonetheless: what is your innovation on Popper in epistemology, science, and truth?”—Moritz Bierling

    [G]REAT QUESTION. THANKS. It’s very hard to do this question justice in a few thousand words. But tend to think of it as in the last century we had a lot of thinkers basically fail to complete the scientific method and thereby create a test of non-falseness like we do in law. And they couldn’t do it. What I’ve done, because I”ve been lucky enough to spend most of my life working with “computable” systems – meaning **existentially possible to construct through a series of operations** is supply the habits of strict operational construction with requirements for existential possibiity, to the scientific method, and complete what those thinkers failed to discover. POPPER Popper applied Jewish critique, (criticism, which evolved into cultural marxism), to science, as “falsificationism”. Meaning, the way to avoid pseudoscience is to require that a statement be falsifiable. He did this because pseudoscience was rapidly expanding under the popularity of authoritarian socialism, as much as because he was simply interested in philosophy. He was trying to preserve intellectual cosmopolitanism (Jewish diasporism), and this culminated in his work “The Open Society” which is what Soros uses as his ‘plan’. Now, in his efforts to correct science, he developed a set of ideas that I will try to reduce to these: 1) Falsification (critique, criticism) vs justificationism (excuses) 2) Critical Rationalism: we can 3) Critical Preference: we cannot know which theory is more likely true. there is no method of decidability. 4) Verisimilitude through Problem->Theory->Test 5) That science, by verisimilitude, is conducted as a MORAL (social, normative) process, and that scientific discovery was accomplished by moral means. BUT THIS IS THE PROBLEMUnempirical: his statements are logical not empirical, and he never did any research, nor has any been formally done. Costs: he, like most philosophers, continues the Aristotelian tradition of ignoring costs. Costs provide us with information about which theories we can afford to pursue. Historically then, we can empirically demonstrate that man uses costs as methods of decidability. Decidability: Costs provide decidability, for the simple reason that just as we pursue the least cost methods of research, nature evolves using the least cost method of evolution. It’s only humans that can choose to do the expensive thing and take a risk. Nature can’t do that. Nature is tightly deterministic. Man is only loosely deterministic. Because all of us guess a future and see if we can achieve it. Falsification: Falsification is not very precise, and he did not see the dimensions. So he did not restate the scientific method as a series of dimensional tests equal to the dimensional tests of mathematics. So categories(identity), math(relations), logic (words/membership), operations (costs/existence), morality (choice/cooperation), and scope (full accounting) were each methods of falsification, that a scientific statement would have to pass. Verisimilitude: Because costs do determine the progress of our investigations, our knowledge evolves just as organisms evolve, planets evolve, solar systems, galaxies, and the universe. What differs is the cost of inquiry in each culture. White people happen to have the lowest cost of inquiry because they have a high trust civilization where the norm of truth is highly defended as (nearly sacred) public property. Physical absence vs Social presence of first causes. Unable to distinguish between the problem of instrumentation in the physical sciences in the absence of knowledge of first causes (‘nature’s choice’), versus the problem of subjective instrumentation in the social sciences, in the presence of first causes (sympathetic choice) The Cycle Problem -> Theory -> Test is actually … incomplete. The correct structure is: Perception(random) -> …Free association (searching) -> ……Hypothesis (wayfinding) -> ………Criticism(test – individual investment) -> …………Theory (recipe/route) -> ……………Social Criticism (common investment) -> ………………Law (exhaustion – return on investment) -> …………………Survival (Perfect Parsimony – incorporation into norms) -> ……………………Tautology ( invisible – assumed world structure ) This long chain that represents the evolutionary survival of ideas, can be broken into these sections: 1 – Perception -> free association(searching) -> identity (opportunity) 2 – Question (Problem) 3 – Iterative Criticism ( Survival!!! ) ………..wayfinding (criticism) / Hypothesis.  Wayfinding is a form of criticizing an idea. ………..criticism / theory / personal use ………..testing / law / general use ………..recognition / survival / universal use ………..identity / tautology / integration into world view. DIMENSIONS OF CRITICISM The dimensions of criticism in pursuit of Determinism (Regularity, Predictability, “true”) – categorical consistency (identity) – internal consistency (logical) (mathematical/relations, linguistic/sets) – external consistency (empirical correspondence) – existential consistency (existential possibility) – moral consistency (symmetric non imposition) – scope consistency (full accounting, limits, parsimony) If a statement (promises) or theory passes all of these tests it is very hard for it to still contain their opposites: – error in its many forms – bias – wishful thinking in its many forms. – suggestion – pleading – guilting – shaming – complimenting – obscurantism, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience – overloading – lying and deceit in their many forms. TRUTH Truth is the most parsimonious operational description that we can give short of a tautology. In other words, truth is the search FOR TRUE NAMES. MORE I have also discussed truth in quite a bit of depth elsewhere so I don’t feel its important to discuss it here. SUMMARY So what I have attempted to do is ‘complete’ the scientific method, that popper started upon. It is not particular to science, but to any TESTIMONY we might attempt to give. The consequence of doing so is that philosophy, morality, law, and science are now synonyms using the same language and structure. Which kind of floored me actually. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute

  • Q&A: Curt: What is Your Innovation on Popper in Epistemology, Science, and Truth?

    –“Curt, I believe I already know the answer to this, but believe it to be valuable to your general audience nonetheless: what is your innovation on Popper in epistemology, science, and truth?”—Moritz Bierling

    [G]REAT QUESTION. THANKS. It’s very hard to do this question justice in a few thousand words. But tend to think of it as in the last century we had a lot of thinkers basically fail to complete the scientific method and thereby create a test of non-falseness like we do in law. And they couldn’t do it. What I’ve done, because I”ve been lucky enough to spend most of my life working with “computable” systems – meaning **existentially possible to construct through a series of operations** is supply the habits of strict operational construction with requirements for existential possibiity, to the scientific method, and complete what those thinkers failed to discover. POPPER Popper applied Jewish critique, (criticism, which evolved into cultural marxism), to science, as “falsificationism”. Meaning, the way to avoid pseudoscience is to require that a statement be falsifiable. He did this because pseudoscience was rapidly expanding under the popularity of authoritarian socialism, as much as because he was simply interested in philosophy. He was trying to preserve intellectual cosmopolitanism (Jewish diasporism), and this culminated in his work “The Open Society” which is what Soros uses as his ‘plan’. Now, in his efforts to correct science, he developed a set of ideas that I will try to reduce to these: 1) Falsification (critique, criticism) vs justificationism (excuses) 2) Critical Rationalism: we can 3) Critical Preference: we cannot know which theory is more likely true. there is no method of decidability. 4) Verisimilitude through Problem->Theory->Test 5) That science, by verisimilitude, is conducted as a MORAL (social, normative) process, and that scientific discovery was accomplished by moral means. BUT THIS IS THE PROBLEMUnempirical: his statements are logical not empirical, and he never did any research, nor has any been formally done. Costs: he, like most philosophers, continues the Aristotelian tradition of ignoring costs. Costs provide us with information about which theories we can afford to pursue. Historically then, we can empirically demonstrate that man uses costs as methods of decidability. Decidability: Costs provide decidability, for the simple reason that just as we pursue the least cost methods of research, nature evolves using the least cost method of evolution. It’s only humans that can choose to do the expensive thing and take a risk. Nature can’t do that. Nature is tightly deterministic. Man is only loosely deterministic. Because all of us guess a future and see if we can achieve it. Falsification: Falsification is not very precise, and he did not see the dimensions. So he did not restate the scientific method as a series of dimensional tests equal to the dimensional tests of mathematics. So categories(identity), math(relations), logic (words/membership), operations (costs/existence), morality (choice/cooperation), and scope (full accounting) were each methods of falsification, that a scientific statement would have to pass. Verisimilitude: Because costs do determine the progress of our investigations, our knowledge evolves just as organisms evolve, planets evolve, solar systems, galaxies, and the universe. What differs is the cost of inquiry in each culture. White people happen to have the lowest cost of inquiry because they have a high trust civilization where the norm of truth is highly defended as (nearly sacred) public property. Physical absence vs Social presence of first causes. Unable to distinguish between the problem of instrumentation in the physical sciences in the absence of knowledge of first causes (‘nature’s choice’), versus the problem of subjective instrumentation in the social sciences, in the presence of first causes (sympathetic choice) The Cycle Problem -> Theory -> Test is actually … incomplete. The correct structure is: Perception(random) -> …Free association (searching) -> ……Hypothesis (wayfinding) -> ………Criticism(test – individual investment) -> …………Theory (recipe/route) -> ……………Social Criticism (common investment) -> ………………Law (exhaustion – return on investment) -> …………………Survival (Perfect Parsimony – incorporation into norms) -> ……………………Tautology ( invisible – assumed world structure ) This long chain that represents the evolutionary survival of ideas, can be broken into these sections: 1 – Perception -> free association(searching) -> identity (opportunity) 2 – Question (Problem) 3 – Iterative Criticism ( Survival!!! ) ………..wayfinding (criticism) / Hypothesis.  Wayfinding is a form of criticizing an idea. ………..criticism / theory / personal use ………..testing / law / general use ………..recognition / survival / universal use ………..identity / tautology / integration into world view. DIMENSIONS OF CRITICISM The dimensions of criticism in pursuit of Determinism (Regularity, Predictability, “true”) – categorical consistency (identity) – internal consistency (logical) (mathematical/relations, linguistic/sets) – external consistency (empirical correspondence) – existential consistency (existential possibility) – moral consistency (symmetric non imposition) – scope consistency (full accounting, limits, parsimony) If a statement (promises) or theory passes all of these tests it is very hard for it to still contain their opposites: – error in its many forms – bias – wishful thinking in its many forms. – suggestion – pleading – guilting – shaming – complimenting – obscurantism, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience – overloading – lying and deceit in their many forms. TRUTH Truth is the most parsimonious operational description that we can give short of a tautology. In other words, truth is the search FOR TRUE NAMES. MORE I have also discussed truth in quite a bit of depth elsewhere so I don’t feel its important to discuss it here. SUMMARY So what I have attempted to do is ‘complete’ the scientific method, that popper started upon. It is not particular to science, but to any TESTIMONY we might attempt to give. The consequence of doing so is that philosophy, morality, law, and science are now synonyms using the same language and structure. Which kind of floored me actually. Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute