Justified doubt is a sign of superior intellect whereas certainty is equally common to all beings. Among humans, the proportion of facts that anyone may hold to be certain over the number they may doubt usually varies little from person to person, or group to group. We are infected with a spirit of conservatism and would rather make small alterations in our mental shortcuts than large ones; and though varied are the contents of our beliefs, healthy humans are naturally predictable in their submission to the environment as given, and as directly experienced. To be known in this sense of the term is not to have been derived from a syllogism, but to have been experienced firsthand. This overwhelming tribunal of the experience is home to both the mystical and the scientific views (or proposed facts) of the world, though in very different, and often contradictory ways. Regular human beings hover above the two extremes, neither disbelieving the ordinary realities of their physical existence as mystics do, nor taking the extra care and effort (as well as years of study) to sift out the propaganda, outdated theory, or pure superstition; especially when it comes to fundamental social questions of epistemology. The object of this paper’s attack - unjustified doubt - may plague society in a junction of unpreparedness and malice; if this greatest of civic vices appears, it shall surely pose a danger to the fabric of a whole free society. I have been thinking about these topics, on and off, for two years, and I share my views with you as they are. I have neither a definitive theory, nor real certainty in the fact that my opinions about truth (or rather - about the humanitarian problem of epistemology) are true, and yet I am certain in them, for the time being.
There is no real controversy in the study of our most important faculty - language - or at least, a controversy between obvious science and the non-science. As far as practice (and objective progress) is concerned, the secrets have been spilled, the case is closed… It is also a matter of great importance that the former, when taken as a foundation for society, leads to freedom; the latter - to tremendous pain and suffering. Varying levels of competence in our use of language shape our arguments, ontology, and way of life - determine our susceptibility to disinformation, manipulation, and war mongering… Controversies, of which there are admittedly many in the ‘academia’ and the world, rage within their respective domains, meeting not head-on, but having spilled out into the social fabric of society. Seriously! no respected linguist argues with a Platonist essentialist; true, there may be tremendous respect of character, but no - not argument between the views. Culture wars there are and have been many, and yet the confrontation of reason and unreason has outstayed them all. Starting from the incorrect use of language, unreason has forever been entrenched in all parts of our lives. Known sometimes as common sense (although we’ll see, it has two different meanings) utilizing it has always been the strategy of the revolt against freedom, and it always had the peculiar advantage of sentiments, - which it aided, rather than fought. To understand unreason, we need to understand the language, and understand argument; but equally heed the social and historical realities of peoples, sometimes even whole nations.
It doesn’t make sense to have one belief - one requires countless, and this fact has been long known. It came first not from evolutionary biology, but from the syllogism, some 2500 years ago; when it was seen that each logical (a priori) derivation required that something be given, and so ad infinitum. Even the “empiricist” - Aristotle - took the wrong lesson from this. Oh, how I would like to shout back in time to him: “Forget about dialectical change into what something already is, forget those final causes. Dialectics are sufficiently vague to describe anything, and therefore useful in describing nothing!”. The Platonic insight, the great discovery, is really no discovery at all, but the best refutation of its own argument - the ultimate demonstrative proof of its futility, of its lack of argument! Simply speaking, if there is no objective set of concrete empirical factors, by which I might identify all possible objects of a certain class, something as simple as “cup” for instance, why do I take it as proof, that some invisible thing exists behind this barren desert that I cannot find? why is the logic of my language recognized as supreme over demonstrative reality? It is as if one says: there are these exactly similar views of the world, they change nothing identifiable in my environment, and I prefer the one that has invisible objects the perfection of which is proved by my inability to find them; their existence - by their presence in the habits of my communication - a priori. There, in the realm of professional philosophy (take it as literature, or history if you will) these ideas themselves pose meager danger, and are in fact, wonderful to engage with. In the wider social world, the same habits of thought (which will be shown to properly derive from our language) lead to epistemological blindness and create dangers for us all.
There are things that can be put in your pocket, and there are things that exist but can not be put in your pocket - rather different things in the ontologies of different fields; The goal of reduction - of unified theory - has been promisingly pursued by physics, and disastrously so - by philosophy. Furthermore, the former, in its reduction of other sciences to itself, poses no challenge to the accepted methodologies of these fields, rather aiding and completing them. We understand, that science itself can explain human categories biologically, rather than conceptually or teleologically - There is in fact no need for the uncertainty of atoms and subatomic particles to cloud our judgment of ‘things’ in their naive, laymen, sense. Philosophy, or rather a particular branch of unreasonable philosophy, has unfortunately led precisely in the opposite direction, posing not too serious, but still, a tedious problem to be heeded. For thousands of years, it was known as essentialist, then Christian philosophy (what a perversion of the spirit of the New Testament). Then, when it finally dropped the invisible objects (or the unchangeable ideas mentioned in the last paragraph), they came upon to the most radical reversion, justified by dialectics - the supposed dialectics of the Enlightenment. the subjectivist philosophers argue that both epistemologically and ontologically no viewpoint is distinguishable from the other in terms of superior proof; as signifiers and the signified they are malleable, and consequently, they have turned into natural (and often times unwilling) allies of authoritarianism around the world - this is in all fairness a contingent fact global politics, but one can not avoid pondering about the structure that makes it all possible. People as sincere as college students, and as malicious as the leaders of the Russian Federation argue for not just moral, but ontological or epistemological (we will see, this distinction is often meaningless) relativity - they have fundamental agreement in their attitude toward the truth. It is important to aid your allies in politics, by subjecting your common enemy, if possible to a relentless power of truth. Abstinence from this road is an implicit, even if imprecise, acceptance of moral degradation.
Through recent events, the role of the international rules-based order came to a juncture - a juncture of unpreparedness and malice; malice that transcends and covers all geopolitical divisions - while there are people, stuck between. The distinction, between the realms open to legitimate relativity, and realms logically closed to it, as foreshadowed at the beginning of this paragraph, are facts, and ethics - disputed now more than ever by Great powers and the weak alike. The combination of these aspects is called both propaganda and the practice of law. Law is in fact the most perfect piece of propaganda - the more so if it's just. If it's just, we must also support it, even as it stands on the verge of melting away, - especially, at this crucial point. If the law is unjust, we must oppose it with the appropriate intensity, and yet the legal question here is tough. “Custom consolidates what accident may have originated; established power has a way of legitimizing itself”. Institutions are like fortresses, they need to be both well-built and manned. You need to protect your institutions from the people inside of them. Letting your constitution die is a worse fate then letting the scum live - if you so consider them. Once the communists waited for capitalism to destroy itself, and welcomed the rise of fascism as the last stage before the inevitable revolution, but the revolution never came - because they never acted. Voting for Biden this coming election? Do you prefer to put the constitution of the United States of America under greater pressure from authoritarianism than it has ever suffered, or to keep it in the hands of the establishment, to be safely mended and exploited - leveraged for the security of vast swathes of land sea and air around the world which the united states seek to keep free of dominion by its adversaries. I prefer the latter - I know there is no compromise. This I reckon is enough of an introduction. These philosophical (and not political!) questions will be addressed in greater detail.
Justified doubt is a sign of superior intellect whereas certainty is equally common to all beings. Among humans, the proportion of facts that anyone may hold to be certain over the number they may doubt usually varies little from person to person, or group to group. We are infected with a spirit of conservatism and would rather make small alterations in our mental shortcuts than large ones; and though varied are the contents of our beliefs, healthy humans are naturally predictable in their submission to the environment as given, and as directly experienced. To be known in this sense of the term is not to have been derived from a syllogism, but to have been experienced firsthand. This overwhelming tribunal of the experience is home to both the mystical and the scientific views (or proposed facts) of the world, though in very different, and often contradictory ways. Regular human beings hover above the two extremes, neither disbelieving the ordinary realities of their physical existence as mystics do, nor taking the extra care and effort (as well as years of study) to sift out the propaganda, outdated theory, or pure superstition; especially when it comes to fundamental social questions of epistemology. The object of this paper’s attack - unjustified doubt - may plague society in a junction of unpreparedness and malice; if this greatest of civic vices appears, it shall surely pose a danger to the fabric of a whole free society. I have been thinking about these topics, on and off, for two years, and I share my views with you as they are. I have neither a definitive theory, nor real certainty in the fact that my opinions about truth (or rather - about the humanitarian problem of epistemology) are true, and yet I am certain in them, for the time being.
There is no real controversy in the study of our most important faculty - language - or at least, a controversy between obvious science and the non-science. As far as practice (and objective progress) is concerned, the secrets have been spilled, the case is closed… It is also a matter of great importance that the former, when taken as a foundation for society, leads to freedom; the latter - to tremendous pain and suffering. Varying levels of competence in our use of language shape our arguments, ontology, and way of life - determine our susceptibility to disinformation, manipulation, and war mongering… Controversies, of which there are admittedly many in the ‘academia’ and the world, rage within their respective domains, meeting not head-on, but having spilled out into the social fabric of society. Seriously! no respected linguist argues with a Platonist essentialist; true, there may be tremendous respect of character, but no - not argument between the views. Culture wars there are and have been many, and yet the confrontation of reason and unreason has outstayed them all. Starting from the incorrect use of language, unreason has forever been entrenched in all parts of our lives. Known sometimes as common sense (although we’ll see, it has two different meanings) utilizing it has always been the strategy of the revolt against freedom, and it always had the peculiar advantage of sentiments, - which it aided, rather than fought. To understand unreason, we need to understand the language, and understand argument; but equally heed the social and historical realities of peoples, sometimes even whole nations.
It doesn’t make sense to have one belief - one requires countless, and this fact has been long known. It came first not from evolutionary biology, but from the syllogism, some 2500 years ago; when it was seen that each logical (a priori) derivation required that something be given, and so ad infinitum. Even the “empiricist” - Aristotle - took the wrong lesson from this. Oh, how I would like to shout back in time to him: “Forget about dialectical change into what something already is, forget those final causes. Dialectics are sufficiently vague to describe anything, and therefore useful in describing nothing!”. The Platonic insight, the great discovery, is really no discovery at all, but the best refutation of its own argument - the ultimate demonstrative proof of its futility, of its lack of argument! Simply speaking, if there is no objective set of concrete empirical factors, by which I might identify all possible objects of a certain class, something as simple as “cup” for instance, why do I take it as proof, that some invisible thing exists behind this barren desert that I cannot find? why is the logic of my language recognized as supreme over demonstrative reality? It is as if one says: there are these exactly similar views of the world, they change nothing identifiable in my environment, and I prefer the one that has invisible objects the perfection of which is proved by my inability to find them; their existence - by their presence in the habits of my communication - a priori. There, in the realm of professional philosophy (take it as literature, or history if you will) these ideas themselves pose meager danger, and are in fact, wonderful to engage with. In the wider social world, the same habits of thought (which will be shown to properly derive from our language) lead to epistemological blindness and create dangers for us all.
There are things that can be put in your pocket, and there are things that exist but can not be put in your pocket - rather different things in the ontologies of different fields; The goal of reduction - of unified theory - has been promisingly pursued by physics, and disastrously so - by philosophy. Furthermore, the former, in its reduction of other sciences to itself, poses no challenge to the accepted methodologies of these fields, rather aiding and completing them. We understand, that science itself can explain human categories biologically, rather than conceptually or teleologically - There is in fact no need for the uncertainty of atoms and subatomic particles to cloud our judgment of ‘things’ in their naive, laymen, sense. Philosophy, or rather a particular branch of unreasonable philosophy, has unfortunately led precisely in the opposite direction, posing not too serious, but still, a tedious problem to be heeded. For thousands of years, it was known as essentialist, then Christian philosophy (what a perversion of the spirit of the New Testament). Then, when it finally dropped the invisible objects (or the unchangeable ideas mentioned in the last paragraph), they came upon to the most radical reversion, justified by dialectics - the supposed dialectics of the Enlightenment. the subjectivist philosophers argue that both epistemologically and ontologically no viewpoint is distinguishable from the other in terms of superior proof; as signifiers and the signified they are malleable, and consequently, they have turned into natural (and often times unwilling) allies of authoritarianism around the world - this is in all fairness a contingent fact global politics, but one can not avoid pondering about the structure that makes it all possible. People as sincere as college students, and as malicious as the leaders of the Russian Federation argue for not just moral, but ontological or epistemological (we will see, this distinction is often meaningless) relativity - they have fundamental agreement in their attitude toward the truth. It is important to aid your allies in politics, by subjecting your common enemy, if possible to a relentless power of truth. Abstinence from this road is an implicit, even if imprecise, acceptance of moral degradation.
Through recent events, the role of the international rules-based order came to a juncture - a juncture of unpreparedness and malice; malice that transcends and covers all geopolitical divisions - while there are people, stuck between. The distinction, between the realms open to legitimate relativity, and realms logically closed to it, as foreshadowed at the beginning of this paragraph, are facts, and ethics - disputed now more than ever by Great powers and the weak alike. The combination of these aspects is called both propaganda and the practice of law. Law is in fact the most perfect piece of propaganda - the more so if it's just. If it's just, we must also support it, even as it stands on the verge of melting away, - especially, at this crucial point. If the law is unjust, we must oppose it with the appropriate intensity, and yet the legal question here is tough. “Custom consolidates what accident may have originated; established power has a way of legitimizing itself”. Institutions are like fortresses, they need to be both well-built and manned. You need to protect your institutions from the people inside of them. Letting your constitution die is a worse fate then letting the scum live - if you so consider them. Once the communists waited for capitalism to destroy itself, and welcomed the rise of fascism as the last stage before the inevitable revolution, but the revolution never came - because they never acted. Voting for Biden this coming election? Do you prefer to put the constitution of the United States of America under greater pressure from authoritarianism than it has ever suffered, or to keep it in the hands of the establishment, to be safely mended and exploited - leveraged for the security of vast swathes of land sea and air around the world which the united states seek to keep free of dominion by its adversaries. I prefer the latter - I know there is no compromise. This I reckon is enough of an introduction. These philosophical (and not political!) questions will be addressed in greater detail.