Open Society

Logical Fallacies?

I just stumbled upon this nice little website. It is a summation of common informal fallicies, neatly presented and easy to read. The striking thing is how many are not fallicies except within the context of justificationism.

New Pages!

Check to the right handside of my blog to find the pages.

There are only two at the moment, both are provisional and will hopefully be improved in time. The first is Justificaitonism, and is a rehash of my blog entry An Atttempt to Explain the Dogmatic Framework of Thought, and the second is Criticalism, which offers an alternative to Justificationism.

If you have any questions or criticisms to make of my descriptions, then I would be happy to consider them, as I would like the descriptions to be as accessible as possible.

Thanks!

Smoke-On-Trent

Reading the BBC News website today, specifcially this and this, I couldn't help but be reminded of something the late Milton Friedman said in an interview. To paraphrase: aren't we lucky that government bereaucracies are so inept and inneficient, or else we wouldn't likely have any freedom at all.

I am particularly amused/disgusted that the government keeps touting that 80% of the population support the ban (a figure I am highly sceptical of), as though if 80% of the population in Nazi Germany supported the Final Solution, well that'd make it just dandy.

Naughty Children

When a child is angry at their parents they can say terrible things, such as that they hate them, never want to see them again and wish the worst upon them. Of course, when a child throws a tantrum like this we do not take them seriously, and are confident that they don't really mean what they say, best just let the anger pass.

I find it to be very dangerous that so many in politics and the media take a similar attitude toward Islamic terrorists, never really listening to the content of what they say, or their own explanation of their motivations, instead simply dismissing it as a childlike tantrum.

An Attempt to Explain the Dogmatic Framework of Thought

Justificationism

The presupposition that knowledge must be certified, verified, proved, validated, founded or otherwise justified. If a belief is knowledge then it is justified, and if a belief is unjustified then it is not knowledge. It follows that any claim to knowledge can be criticised by asking for its justification, and failure to provide such justification is enough to reject that claim to knowledge. In this context, rationality consists of provisioning evidence, support, reasons or proof to justify beliefs, and failure to provision such a justification renders the belief irrational.

For a justificationist, the purpose of philosophical investigation is not the pursuit of true belief, but the pursuit of justified belief. This difference is subtle but important: while a justified belief is always true, an unjustified belief is not necessarily false. The focus of justificationism is upon subjective beliefs, and not the objective truth of beliefs. For example, justificationists are not concerned with whether the proposition 'this table is white' is true, but whether the belief 'this table is white' is justified. In other words, belief in a true proposition is not knowledge, only justified belief in a true proposition is knowledge.

To determine whether a claim to knowledge is a justified belief, a justificationist asks for support, reasons or proof be provisioned to justify that belief, and failure to provide such justification is enough to reject that claim to knowledge. It follows that to obtain knowledge it is necessary to identify an authority, which can provision a sufficient reason to justify beliefs. For example, to justify beliefs an appeal can be made to the authority of the senses, intellectual intuition, the pope, qu'ran, etc. In this context, philosophical investigation concerns a search for authority, and the problems of philosophy are framed to demand authoritarian solutions.

If a justificationist concludes that no authority can justify a belief then no claim to knowledge can be justified whatever, and there is no justified belief. But since asking for justification is how he decides which beliefs count as knowledge, in the absence of a justifying authority there is no way for him to choose between competing belief systems, For such a justificationist, every belief is equally unjustified, and therefore equally justified. In this context, philosophical investigation concerns the interpretation of society, philosophers and texts, everything is relative and such notions as truth, reality, morality, etc. are reduced to fictions, myths and stories.

The two kinds of justificationist described above may be called authoritarians and anarchists, where the former adopts an authority such as the senses, intellectual intuition, the pope, qu'ran, etc. and the latter rejects all authority whatever. The authoritarian tradition is represented by most of western philosophy, such as empiricism, objectivism, foundationism, Christianity, Islam, etc. whereas the anarchistic tradition is represented by scepticism, postmodernism, decontructionism, relativism, etc. It is important to understand: whatever differences may appear between anarchistic and authoritarian philosophies, and however much they disagree, both sponsor justificationism.

Western philosophical tradition is dominated by justificationist philosophies, to such an extent that few recognise that they are justificationists, or that there may be an alternative. The presuppositions of justificationism are implicit in almost all philosophical discussion, and uncritically accepted. Furthermore, these presuppositions constitute a reinforced dogmatism, since any attempt to introduce an alternative can be dismissed as unjustified, and because justificationism defines the rules by which competing proposals are evaluated, it can ensure its own protection from competition.

Ethics

Here is me speculating about ethics...

(1) ethics is in need of a demarcational criterion, which would serve a similar function to falsification in science, so that we can correctly identify which propositions are subject to ethical inquiry and which are not.

(2) the first criterion I would propose might be called the criterion of feasibility, or possibility. Since ethics concerns the consequences which our actions have upon others, it follows that ethics only concerns those actions which it is feasible, or possible, to act out.

(3) from (1) and (2) it follows that ethics concerns those propositions of how we ought to behave which belong to the set of feasible, or possible, choices. It also follows that propositions like "the sun will rise tomorrow" are unethical, not because we are opposed to them, but in the same way in which a tautology is unscientific.

(4) an ethical theory must divide the set of feasible choices into two nonoverlapping subsets, moral and immoral acts. If an ethical theory fails to satisfy this divide, then it is amoral. (This has important consequences for ethical philosophies such as moral positivism, historicism and any in the justificationist metacontext).

(5) the search for what is moral (i.e. right), and by what is immoral (i.e. wrong) is our guiding principle, just as truth and falsity are for science. In other words, I assume a principle of bivalence to hold for morality, though assume no uncriticisable criterion for identifying right from wrong.

(6) (1) to (6) are open to criticism: revision or rejection. To accept any theory, whether ethical, scientific or metaphysical, is to accept it tentatively, including this theory itself.

The above is just a sketch of the basics, but even from this we can solve a number of ethical problems. For example:

(a) we identify those entities in the world which should be punished, by their capacity to alter their behavior in the light of negative feedback, so the mentally ill patient who mistakes his nurse for the devil and attacks her is not punished, and neither is the child who could not understand what they had done wrong.

(b) following from (a) we can identify who we might punish for negligence, or incompetence, apposed to those who, being human and fallible, simply made a mistake.

(c) justificationist ethical theories impose a standard which it is impossible to satisfy, and so inevitably conclude that everything is immoral. This according to our metaethical principle in (4), renders all justificationist ethical theories amoral.

(d) ethical theories which identify that which is, with that which is right, such as historicism, naturalism, or moral positivism, are all amoral, since they conclude that all possible choices are moral and fail to satisfy (4).

(e) the is-ought problem is not solved per se, since we have not shown that an ought can be derived from an is. However, we have shown that an ought can be refuted by an is, and so forged a relationship between the world of fact and the world of morality.

I had some other thoughts about this that I just can't remember right this second... oh well.

Justificationists All the Way Down

I first read this, like many others, in Stephen Hawking's classic A Brief history of Time, though ever since reading William Warren Bartley's Retreat to Commitment, it takes on a whole new meaning.

A well-known scientist (some say it was the philosopher Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

Knowledge, like the Earth, is in no need of a solid foundation.