http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/–THIS S.E.P. ENTRY IS A TRAVESTY OF CONFUSION–
There is no correspondence with NECESSITY in this article. We are silent on the most important topic of our times: that is, that liberty is necessarily dependent upon property rights, and that is all.
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-03 09:58:00 UTC
http://archive.mises.org/18385/the-origin-of-libertarianism/LIBERTARIANS AND THE HIGH BAR OF REASON
You know if you have a sort of crazy liberal or conservative, they almost always argue from sentiment, and sometimes morality. But libertarians argue from morality and reason. The problem is that the barrier to entry for ‘reason’ is a lot higher than the barrier to entry for morality or sentiment. And the number of libertarians that can’t cross that barrier is just as high as the number of conservatives and liberals that can’t cross it. So more libertarians look like idiots than conservatives and liberals, simply because the bar to NOT look like an idiot is a lot higher in libertarianism. Thankfully a lot of us get over that bar.
Although, not enough unfortunately. 🙂
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-30 15:34:00 UTC
Given the difficulty in constructing and maintaining lies, and the value of obscurant language in constructing the least detectable and most successful lies, what book would you recommend that could best, through study, teach one to lie?
Now, having made that estimation, what book has empirically demonstrated the greatest ability to teach people to lie?
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-26 19:12:00 UTC
WISDOM: JUSTIFICATION
“In our culture, justificationism is axiomatic. The people who’ve had the intelligence and insight to question it are barely understood.” -Ken Hopf.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-17 08:35:00 UTC
THE PROBLEM OF JUSTIFICATION IN PHILOSOPHY
There is a pretty interesting play in philosophy between justification and innovation. It certainly seems that most innovations are the byproduct of justification. That is, we seek to justify some objective and we search for means of justifying it, rather than seek what is in fact ‘true’.
Because, what is ‘true’ in ethics depends upon (a) the allocation of property rights as implied in the norms, (b) the structure of the family and (c) the structure of production.
I think some people gasp this, but most do not grasp the degree to which some of us practice either justificationism or critical rationalism.
Mises and Weber, Rothbard and Hoppe, Hayek and historians, have all sought justification. The most interesting recent writer is JC Lester, who came very, very close to the answer of propertarianism, but was so enthralled with trying to justify his methodology, and libertarian bias, he missed the fact that propertarian reasoning makes all moral codes commensurable.
It’s not that property per se, mandates libertarian moral biases. It’s that the distribution of property rights determines what is moral in any population. Individual property rights benefit the nuclear family, but they do not benefit the extended family structure. For members of the nuclear family, all other members of the society who also exist in, and cater to, the nuclear family, are treated as potential mates, or near relatives. As such, everyone is family. And as such, all in-family morals are applied to all extra-family members of the society. This is what makes the high trust society.
So private property rights are inseparable from the nuclear family, and a homogenous polity, that can reasonably be expected to act as an extended family. This is why norms are so rigid in high trust cultures, yet require so little enforcement.
There is nothing in propertarian reasoning specific to libertarianism whatsoever. Propertarianism is an explanatory system for rendering all human behavior commensurable, without linguistic and moral loading.
Propertarianism is what praxeology would have been if it was complete. Because propertarianism is praxeology completed.
That said, our ability to stay ahead of Malthusian poverty is predicated on our rate of innovation, and it is not possible to innovate and provide incentives sufficient to organize or participate in production of an innovation without private property rights. Just can’t. It’s just math. The friction is too high. And the future too Kaleidic for individuals to constantly make cooperative decisions on the multitude of possible ends to which we put our time, effort, and scarce property to productive use.
Libertarian societies will always out-perform communal societies. And in that sense, they are the only societies that can defeat malthus.
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-16 10:03:00 UTC
If the purpose of objective truth is persuasion, then why is it a mystery why most of the world tries to escape objective truth?
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-06 10:24:00 UTC
(REPOST) THE HIERARCHY OF ARGUMENTS:
Expressive, Sentimental, Moral, Historical, Scientific, Economic, Ratio-Scientific.
I developed this list in order to classify the structure of different political arguments, in the hope that could increase awareness of what makes stronger and weaker arguments, in my ongoing attempt to give conservatives a ratio-scientific means of conducting aristocratic egalitarian arguments.
EXCERPT:
I. DEGREES OF POLITICAL ARGUMENT
——————————————————–
Curt Doolittle’s “Degrees Of Political Argument”*1, from least to most substantive: *1[capitalismv3.com 2011]
1) EXPRESSIVE (emotional): a type of argument where a person expresses a positive or negative opinion based upon his emotional response to the subject.
2) SENTIMENTAL (biological): a type of argument that relies upon one of the five (or six) human sentiments, and their artifacts as captured in human traditions, morals, or other unarticulated, but nevertheless consistently and universally demonstrated preferences and behaviors.
3) MORAL (normative) : a type of argument that relies upon a set of assumedly normative rules of whose origin is either (a)socially contractual, (b)biologically natural, (c) economically necessary, or even (d)divine.
4) HISTORICAL (analogical): A spectrum of analogical arguments – from Historical to Anecdotal — that rely upon a relationship between a historical sequence of events, and a present sequence events, in order to suggest that the current events will come to the same conclusion as did the past events, or can be used to invalidate or validate assumptions about the current period.
5) SCIENTIFIC (directly empirical): The use of a set of measurements that produce data that can be used to prove or disprove an hypothesis, but which are subject to human cognitive biases and preferences. ie: ‘Bottom up analysis”
6) ECONOMIC: (indirectly empirical): The use of a set of measures consisting of uncontrolled variables, for the purpose of circumventing the problems of direct human inquiry into human preferences, by the process of capturing demonstrated preferences, as expressed by human exchanges, usually in the form of money. ie: “Top Down Analysis”. The weakness of economic arguments is caused by the elimination of properties and causes that are necessary for the process of aggregation.
7) RATIO-SCIENTIFIC (Comprehensive: Using all above): A rationally articulated argument that makes use of economic, scientific, historical, normative and sentimental information to comprehensively prove that a position is defensible under all objections.
—–
Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2013-10-05 02:11:00 UTC
“IMPERFECTION COMES FROM TRYING TO BE RIGHT”
(Evan Sayet)
So we abandon all reason. Prove that right isn’t right and wrong isn’t wrong. Hate, detest and decry any judgement. There is no criteria for truth, beauty, justice.
“The moral imperative of Indiscriminateness.”
“Rational thought is a hate crime. They cannot judge the merits of the positions that they hold. They have been indoctrinated into the liberal thought process.”
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-28 11:13:00 UTC
MORE ON MATHEMATICAL PLATONISM
(For me. Pls ignore.)
“Famously, Tarski (1936) proved that no classical formal language could contain its own truth predicate, due to Liar’s paradox. As such, if we want to include a truth predicate, we are committed to a hierarchy of languages. Moreover, if consisting only of formal languages, this hierarchy does not collapse: at no level will a language Lm provide a truth predicate for a language Ln, where n ≥ m.”
CD: Yes, but I can see that this is starting to go south already, confusing sets with semantics…
“If one is not committed to strict formalism, there are far less
problems with Tarskian truth. In particular, the hierarchy of
languages can be collapsed. There are two ways of doing this. One
can either move from formal to informal languages – where Tarski’s
undefinability result does not hold in the strict sense – at some
point in the hierarchy, or one can hold some level in the hierarchy
to be of the language-to-world type. Philosophically these two
strategies are largely equivalent, since we seem to have no way of
describing the world outside language. This makes the job a lot
easier for the non-formalist. Rather than try to explain a
problematic relation between mathematical languages and mathematical reality, we can concentrate on characterizing the
connection between our formal and pre-formal mathematical
languages.”
“What proof is to formal mathematics, truth is to pre-formal. We
deal with mathematical proofs syntactically, but at the same time
we as human beings think about them semantically.
CD: Yes.
“We cannot deny pre-formal thinking, and its need for semantical truth. However, this alone is not enough to show a substantial difference between truth and proof. Even though the existence of pre-formal mathematics cannot be reasonably contested, there is always the possibility that when it comes to truth, it is essentially superfluous; whatever we can achieve with truth, we could also achieve with proof alone.”
CD: First, there is a very great difference between truth and proof if mathematics is platonistic and set based. But if it is marginally indifferent and non-platonic then there is no difference. So that’s my concern. But the question I have is, what externalities are produced? It’s a moral question. I know that’s hard to grasp. But a biologist who plays with viruses and a mathematician that teaches platonism both export risks onto others.
“The second problem that the lack of reference causes for
formalism is one that does not require semantical arguments, or
indeed any sophisticated philosophical devices.”
CD: I do not see that as a problem. Nor do I see the need for, or desire for, formalism.
“It could be plausibly claimed that human thinking as we know it could not exist without some mathematical knowledge.
CD: yes, this is correct. But the reason is not stated here.
“But if mathematics has absolutely no reference, what reason do we have for picking one theory over another? It must be remembered here that this reference does not have to mean anything resembling a Platonic universe of mathematical ideas. Simply put, if we believe that 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 3, we must believe in some kind of reference. (It must be noted that I do not mean to use “some” as a hedge word here. My point throughout this work is that the relevant dichotomy is reference against no reference, rather than no reference against Platonist reference.)”
CD: Yes, but if you wrote the argument as human actions in operational language you would not have this problem – which is purely linguistic. And obscurely so.
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 14:25:00 UTC
NOTES ON MATHEMATICAL PHILOSOPHY
“…Mathematics is an established, going concern. Philosophy is as shaky
as can be.”
CD: This seems quaint, as it is meant to seem quaint by the author to illustrate the point. However, the problem of philosophy is one of “intermediacy”, rather than ends. To incorporate new discoveries and ideas into our system of thought. To develop some means of conceptual commensurability. WHile in the past, all domains were at some point parts of philosophy, the success of philosophy has been at casting off those domains. At present, the only remaining domain philosophy addresses is that of the commensurable integration of knew ideas into our body of knowledge. For this reason, philosophy, like money in the calculation plans, makes the moral and ethical world of action commensurable despite the disciplinary differences in method and goal. It may be that all philosophy does is protect us from catastrophic errors that may cause us harm, rather than provide any particular innovation. But the works of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Smith, Hume, Jefferson and Darwin are evidence enough that at times, our entire systems of thought must be reordered, and new values attached to causes and consequences. Or by contrast, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Marx, Freud, Heidegger and Rorty, who have tried to do the opposite: To restore immoral obscurantism as a revolt against modern empirical thought.
“a distinct history in which philosophical theories of mathematics have not been required to conform to the practice of mathematics”
CD: True, but I’m not doing that at all. In Propertarian ethics, I place no constraint on the practice of mathematics. We constrain only what can be SAID about mathematics, for ethical and MORAL reasons. I think that this is the problem that the various Revisionists have tried but failed to address: that philosophy is a social science, and mathematics is a pattern science, but when mathematicians speak of their discipline in public, or to students, or in writing, they are entering the public domain. In all manner of life we place limits on private activity if it has public consequences. In particular, we constrain the conceptual, verbal and physical creations of moral hazards. My criticism of mathematics on Propertarian grounds is not how math is practiced, it is the justification used in mathematics to explain it’s platonism-of-convenience, which in turn, as a matter of public discourse, creates the hazard of mystical platonism.
So if the only constraint is that you must not communicate moral hazards, and that this merely alters the language of your justifications, then this is an internal cost that you may not morally export onto others just because it is convenient to do so.
“One of the most important forms of revisionism in philosophy of mathematics of the latter part of 20th century has been extreme (strict) formalism (nominalism), and its ontological conclusion, Hartry Field’s (1980) fictionalism. According to it mathematical objects do not exist, and the formal axiomatic systems that form the core of mathematics do not refer to anything outside them. In other words, for the extreme formalist rules of proof and axioms
are all there is to mathematics.”
…
“One main purpose of this work is to show that we do not. In this work that is called the problem of theory choice, and I will try to show it to be the most fundamental problem with strict formalist philosophy of mathematics. Simply put, I will argue that when taken to its logical conclusion, extreme formalism implies completely arbitrary mathematics: we would have no reason to prefer one set of axioms and rules of proof over another. That is a staggering conclusion, but we will see it is the only one that can be plausibly made if we reject all outer reference from mathematics. Fortunately it never comes to that, since mathematics without any outer reference does not make sense. We need to explain why we prefer some rules of proof and some axioms to others, and without any concept of reference this cannot be done. In this work I will argue that without any outer reference, mathematics as we know it could simply not be possible: it could not have developed, and it could not be learnt or practised. Sophisticated formal theories are the pinnacle of mathematics but, philosophically, they cannot be studied separately from all the non-formal background behind them.”
CD: Agreed. It is impossible to escape correspondence between method and reality. But lets see where the author takes this…
“In contemporary philosophy of science there is a visible emphasis on what may be called the sociological aspect. Rather than following the Carnapian ideal of neatly structured formal scientific theories, we are now more convinced that the actual practice of science should also have its mark in the philosophy of science. Overall, this is a healthy development, even though it has sparked off less than healthy theories where philosophy of science has become a bastardized form of sociology of science.”
CD: I am a bit troubled by the difference between philosophy of science as a pursuit of truth and the sociology of science as moral and practical counsel. If they are not materially different then this statement makes sense. If instead, that philosophical pursuit of truth is substantially different from the moral and ethical pursuit of social inquiry then I think that this is a failure to understand the function of philosophy as commensurable and ethical, rather than consisting of metaphysical truths.
“We seem to have a great deal of humility toward the methods and practices of
physicists, but in mathematics we reserve a different, much more powerful and revisionist, role to philosophy. It is hard to see the reasons behind the difference in approaches. Perhaps it is because most philosophers of mathematics are more familiar with mathematics than philosophers of physics are with their subject. Modern physics requires, as well as a great deal of expertise, access to a lot of expensive equipment. Mathematics, for the most part, only requires the expertise. In this way most philosophers cannot understand the nature of modern physical inquiry as well as the nature of mathematical inquiry.”
CD: I think the author is mistaken, just as philosophers are mistaken. The philosophical criticism of mathematics is precisely over its abandonment of correspondence and our failure to state the method of correspondence. I see philosophical criticism in the Revisionist and Intuitionist movements as moral objections to the recreation of magic and those criticisms, even if poorly conducted, poorly articulated, are correct. I don’t want to claim that Propertarianism solves this problem I simply think that propertarianism makes it possible to determine the cause of conflict between philosophers and the platonism of classical mathematics. That philosophers mistakenly see their discipline as the pursuit of truth rather than commensurability of systems of recipes is the causal problem. The criticism of the morality of mathematical platonism stands.
“While ontologically minimal, extreme formalism makes mathematics impossible as a human endeavour – which is much more alarming than any intricate philosophical problems. In a nutshell, I will argue that if extreme formalism were correct, mathematics could not have developed in the first place – nor could it be practised today. It must not be forgotten that mathematics is a human endeavour just like all other sciences. If something is essential to mathematics as a human endeavour, we would seem to have good reason to believe it is also a factor in the philosophy of mathematics – or at least something we should expect a theory in philosophy of mathematics not to conflict with.”
CD:I’m not sure where he’s going with this. I agree with the argument that there must be some sort of correspondence in mathematics, and I have argued that this correspondence is reducible to the practical limits of the human mind, which mathematics serves to compensate for. And I think that’s a sufficient argument when combined with commensurability and moral constraint. But perhaps I will learn more from the rest of the paper.
Right now, I must go to the office and do my other job. 🙂
https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/19432/truthpro.pdf?sequence=2
Source date (UTC): 2013-09-26 03:39:00 UTC