Curt Doolittle

Theme: Truth

  • 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.

    ====

    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 else’s 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

  • 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

  • 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.

    ==

    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

    ==

    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

    Jürgen Habermas

    Claus Offe

    Axel Honneth

    Oskar Negt

    Alfred Schmidt

    Albrecht Wellmer

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-30 05:06:00 UTC

  • “BENEFICIALLY NOVEL, GOOD, BAD(WRONG), AND DANGEROUS” (Discussion on Bleeding He

    “BENEFICIALLY NOVEL, GOOD, BAD(WRONG), AND DANGEROUS”

    (Discussion on Bleeding Heart Libertarians: The Measure of an Economist or a Philosopher)

    All,

    A good economists provides us with insights into the state of affairs we live in. A novel economists provides us with new general rules (a theory). A good philosopher explains or re-explains the changes in the world to us in current language. A novel philosopher provides us with a new general rule (a theory).

    It is not better to be good or novel. It is most important that one not be dangerous.

    Freud, Marx and Cantor reintroduced mysticism in the form of obscurantism. Russell compounded that new mysticism. The postmoderns have been terribly damaging to institutions, morality and language. Rothbard did more damage than good. Most of his history is quite good. His ethics were a catastrophe and set us back by decades. A disaster I have been struggling to correct.

    So one can be novel, one can be good, one can be wrong and one can be destructive. I don’t care much about the first three. The fourth quadrant is what I worry about most. Because bad and dangerous philosophy turns out to spread far faster than good and beneficially novel philosophy. Just like bad news spreads faster than good.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute.

    Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-29 10:05:00 UTC

  • 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

  • WE DON”T NEED THEORISTS TO BE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING, JUST BEING RIGHT ABOUT ONE

    WE DON”T NEED THEORISTS TO BE RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING, JUST BEING RIGHT ABOUT ONE THING IS ENOUGH

    (worth repeating)

    Rothbard’s work on banking is some of the best that’s ever been done. His history of economics is some of the best that’s ever been done. He blows it on ethics (which if you follow me is a pretty simple argument) he blows it on praxeology (which a first year philosophy student probably can demonstrate). Hoppe’s the same. If you ignore Argumentation and Praxeology and focus on his theory of socialism and capitalism, his Ethics of Property, his criticism of the incentives of private vs corporate governance, and his solutions to privatizing regulation via competing insurance companies, it’s some of the best and most revolutionary work that’s been done in the past century.

    Philosophers don’t need to be right about everything, they just need to contribute a single novel idea. Hoppe did more than one. And I think his greatest contribution is probably the means of constructing his arguments – which is why I was drawn to him. He has successfully employed economic reasoning to ethics on a scale never done before, in rigorous form.

    If you want to refute Rothbardian ethics, Argumentation Ethics, and Praxeology, then it’s not all that hard (although it took me a long time myself). The thing is, that if you refute those things, it doesn’t change ANYTHING regarding Rothbard’s history or Hoppe’s institutional solutions. In fact, all it does is eliminate a lot of nonsensical justification that isn’t necessary. It’s just a holdover from before the soviet union fell and chia abandoned central planning for state capitalism, and the world understood that socialism was empirically dead, as well as logically. We have evidence now that previous generations didn’t.

    If you pick something you want refuted it’s pretty easy. Search for criticisms of those three topics. I’m probably the best critic of Rothbard’s ethics, but you’ll find Hoppe’s arguments criticized all over the place. But what you won’t find is his solution to the problem of institutions criticized, or Rothbard’s history criticized. Or of you do, I’ll bet its pretty stupid criticism.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy Of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev

    Source date (UTC): 2014-04-27 16:47:00 UTC

  • Curing Libertarian Illiteracy

    [T]he cure to libertarian illiteracy is to keep up on research, rely on science, and not empty verbalism of continental and cosmopolitan rationalism. (See Axelrod – Cooperation. See Fukuyama – Trust. See Todd ‘Explanation of Ideology; The Invention of Europe. See Hannan – The Invention of Liberty. See Kahnemann. See RIdley. See Pinker. See Haidt: Moral Foundations; The Righteous Mind. Here is the bibliography that points to the relevant research. http://www.propertarianism.com/jonathan-haidts-bibliography/ The libertarian spectrum is less ignorant of economics, but libertarian scientific illiteracy, moral blindness, and ideological zeal is nearly universal. Human moral instincts are objective and universal if we account for differences in reproductive strategies: they are prohibitions on free riding. Cultures may randomly invent different moral CODES that incorporate more or less prohibition on free riding, and accommodate the use of property in relation to family size. But the cause of moral instinct is universal: the prohibition on free riding and the requirement for contribution to production. That’s just science. Deal with it.

  • Curing Libertarian Illiteracy

    [T]he cure to libertarian illiteracy is to keep up on research, rely on science, and not empty verbalism of continental and cosmopolitan rationalism. (See Axelrod – Cooperation. See Fukuyama – Trust. See Todd ‘Explanation of Ideology; The Invention of Europe. See Hannan – The Invention of Liberty. See Kahnemann. See RIdley. See Pinker. See Haidt: Moral Foundations; The Righteous Mind. Here is the bibliography that points to the relevant research. http://www.propertarianism.com/jonathan-haidts-bibliography/ The libertarian spectrum is less ignorant of economics, but libertarian scientific illiteracy, moral blindness, and ideological zeal is nearly universal. Human moral instincts are objective and universal if we account for differences in reproductive strategies: they are prohibitions on free riding. Cultures may randomly invent different moral CODES that incorporate more or less prohibition on free riding, and accommodate the use of property in relation to family size. But the cause of moral instinct is universal: the prohibition on free riding and the requirement for contribution to production. That’s just science. Deal with it.

  • 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, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 4 (1944). Tarski, Alfred. “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages”, in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, Clarendon Press, 1956.

  • 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, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 4 (1944). Tarski, Alfred. “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages”, in Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics, Clarendon Press, 1956.