DocWatts

😂😂😂 Best use of a meme I've seen on the Forum in some time. Kudos.

Thought I might add this follow up section, which touches upon the misconception that a Transcendental interpretation of categories is 'scientific'. _________________________________________________ Why Our Limitations Matter The first of these potential pitfalls involves a misconstrual of what this ‘shot across the bow’ to absolute knowledge actually entails. The assertion that conceptual categories aren’t a retrieval of mind-independent distinctions that are ‘out there’ in the world may seem strange. This strangeness is understandable. We live in a scientific culture that’s long since dethroned mankind from the center of the universe, and the suggestion that categories aren’t external to us may seem as if it flies in the face of established knowledge. Naturally, this rejection of mind-independent categories raises some questions, chief among them: doesn’t it resurrect the outdated idea that we occupy a privileged position at the center of Reality? After all, our everyday categories certainly seem to correspond to external, mind-independent distinctions. Before we tackle these concerns, let’s introduce some shorthand that will be helpful going forward. We’ll use ‘Transcendental Categories’ to refer to the tacit assumption that conceptual categories are fixed features of Reality which transcend our human perspective. By contrast, recall that phenomenology is a methodology for scrutinizing how the world shows up for us in the directness of our lived experience. ‘Phenomenological Categories’, then, refers to the idea that categories are anthropocentric schemas that arise from our embodied interactions with the world. With this shorthand in mind, let’s return to the issues that are raised by this phenomenological interpretation of categories. The key question is whether it contradicts well-established observations that we have good reason to trust. To that end, let’s look at it from the perspective of modern science. One of the underlying assumptions of modern science, known as the Mediocrity Principle, holds that we have no inherently privileged position within the cosmos. It’s a denial that our cosmic vantage point holds any special importance within the grand scheme of the universe, just because we happen to be occupying it. Essentially, the principle aims to avoid introducing unintentional anthropocentric bias into our study of the natural world. This is a noble intention, not just for scientific inquiry, but for philosophical investigation as well. Given its emphasis on how conceptual categories are unavoidably anthropocentric, it may be surprising to discover that this phenomenological approach doesn’t contradict the Mediocrity Principle. Instead, it extends it in a more fundamental way. By emphasizing how categories are grounded in a human perspective, we can avoid projecting our own needs, interests, and capacities onto nature. Counterintuitively, by acknowledging the anthropocentric origins of our categories, we gain the ability to critically examine their limitations. This is important because it facilitates a far less biased interpretation of their meaning and significance. Consequently, this phenomenological perspective stands in sharp contrast to the unrealistic assumption that our categories are transcendent representations of a mind-independent Reality. In sum, we gain notable clarity by questioning this insistence that there’s a single correct understanding of Reality that transcends the human perspective. By embracing this human vantage point, and incorporating its underlying limitations into our abstractions, we more effectively safeguard ourselves against self-deception as we interpret Reality through these frameworks.

I thought I might share this write up on meta-rationality which I drafted for the philosophy book I'm working on, 7 Provisional Truths. In it I discuss both the usefulness and limitations of conceptual categories, and make the case that 'Reason' is inherently tied to a human perspective within Reality. And that this is a feature - not a bug - of rationality. _______________________________________________________________________ Context Is King for Categorization What a context refers to is the background situation and circumstances that shape our interpretation of something. Consider spoken language, for instance - and the degree to which tone, body language, and personal relationships contribute to the meaning of a verbal conversation. Although we readily recognize context’s influence on speech, we often fail to acknowledge its foundational importance for the categories we use to make sense of the world. Notably, this contextual influence doesn’t just apply to elusive categories like ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’, whose meanings have been discussed and debated for centuries. It extends to concrete phenomena in the everyday world as well. This includes material objects like tables and chairs, sensory properties like color and texture, and even spatiotemporal fundamentals like space and time. Our intuitions tell us that these everyday categories correspond to ‘objective’ categories that exist in nature; yet this is a mistaken assumption. As we’ll discover, a more complex and fascinating truth awaits us, if we can let go of our rigid insistence that our categories are mirrors of Reality. The roots of this deceptive intuition arise from a fundamental misunderstanding about the formation and function of the categories we use. Conceptual categories, even for seemingly concrete things, aren’t a straightforward retrieval of pre-existing distinctions that are ‘out there’ in the world. Instead, they are more like mental frameworks that help us make sense of our embodied experience. These mental frameworks, or schemas, are inherently tailored to our needs, capacities, and purposes as human beings. In this sense, categories are unavoidably anthropocentric - reflecting our uniquely human perspective within Reality. A schema, simply put, is a pattern for organizing and interpreting information within a given domain. Categories, then, can be understood as anthropocentric schemas, which are unavoidably tied to our embodied experience within the world. This understanding of categories as anthropocentric schemas reveals an important insight into their formation and structure. At their core, categories are functional rather than objective. Their purpose is to help us make predictive generalizations about what we encounter within the world, which is integral to our ability to reason. Reason, then, is our capacity to manipulate and extend these ‘predictive generalizations’ - using them to draw inferences, predict patterns, and reflect upon our embodied experience. A closer look at the formation and structure of categories also invites us to reexamine many of our intuitions about Reason - chief among them, the prevailing assumption that Reason is primarily a detached, intellectual activity. This traditional view presupposes that reason is inherently transcendental, meaning that it literally transcends our human perspective. Reason, in this view, is an inherent feature of Reality, independent of any thinking beings. Going forward, we’ll refer to this perspective as Transcendental Reason. When we use the word ‘Reason’ with a capital R, it’s to this transcendental conception of Reason that we’re referring. The alternative perspective we’ll be exploring aims to show how human reason arises from our embodied, everyday experience - and that reasoning relies significantly upon emotion, imagination, and metaphor. In contrast to capital 'R' Reason, when we use the word with a lowercase 'r', it's to this embodied, human reason that we refer. In connection with this alternate account of reason, we’ll also challenge prevailing assumptions around ‘Objectivity’. These notions often presuppose that there’s a single, correct view of Reality that transcends our human perspective - in essence, a ‘‘Transcendental Objectivity’. In contrast to the transcendental perspective, what we’ll be articulating is a fundamentally ‘human objectivity’. Where the focus is on leveraging a shared human context to arrive at common forms of understanding, without resorting to the unrealistic idea that Reality can be understood from a 'neutral', perspective-free viewpoint. As with our account of ‘Reason’ and ‘reason’, we’ll use a capital ‘O’ when we’re referring to Transcendental Objectivity, and a lowercase ‘o’ for human objectivity. So why draw attention to these distinctions? It’s to highlight that being bound within a context and a perspective isn’t a ‘flaw’ of human reasoning - it’s an essential feature. The epistemological ramifications of this observation are huge. In essence, it’s a ‘shot across the bow’ to notions that we can have absolute or universal knowledge.

Section 3 of 14th Amendment wasn't just written for the Confederacy, it's eminently reasonable to interpret that it was meant to apply to any other violent insurrection attempts in the future as well. Doesn't seem like there should be much ambiguity for anyone who's actually adhering to the spirit of the law in good faith. Trump inciting a violent mob to stop a peaceful transfer of power is a good faith interpretation of an 'insurrection'. Republican claims that Biden's handling of the Southern border somehow constitutes an 'insurrection' is not. In other words, it's almost impossible to write a law that's completely immune from Bad Faith interpretation. (This is leaving aside that it would be better for the country if Trump is defeated at the ballot box, rather than being disqualified. The Law seems pretty clear on this).

I suggest that you introspect on where those feelings are coming from. It's all too easy to misconstrue our feelings of personal discomfort into moral outrage. It's a form of psychological projection that I would invite you to examine. It's okay to feel personally uncomfortable with a lifestyle that feels unfamiliar to you - it's not okay to use that discomfort as justification to dehumanize those people or to strip them of their rights. Maybe you should get to actually know some LGBTQ individuals? Doing so will give you an opportunity to see that they're just regular people, not the abnormal Boogeyman that you're imaging them to be. If you jump into politics without working on integrating this obvious shadow that you have, you'll just end up making the world a worse place.

What you're describing is something called 'Constitutional Hardball'. It's a go-to tactic of 21st century authoritarians who are working within democratic systems. While this is the bread and butter of the modern Republican Party, Trump himself is dumb enough to commit flagrantly criminal actions on top of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_hardball From Wikipedia: Constitutional hardball is the exploitation of procedures, laws and institutions by political actors for partisan gain in ways which violate pre-established norms and push the bounds of legality.[1][2] Legal scholars and political scientists have characterized constitutional hardball as a threat to democracy, because it undermines shared understanding of democratic norms and undermines the expectation that the other side will comply with democratic norms. As a result, the use of constitutional hardball by one side of partisans encourages other partisans to respond in similar fashion.[3][4][2]

To me, the Devil brings to mind someone suave and alluring, who seduces you with charisma and half truths. Not a spray tanned man-child who throws temper tantrums on Twitter He's more like an octogenarian version of Cartman.

Yes, it should have. And if the Republican Party were still a conservative small 'd' democratic party, that should have been the end of his career in politics. In Reality, the entirety of the Republican Party's apparatus has been enabling Trump. The right wing propaganda machine has not only perpetuated Trump's Big Lie, but has spent years grooming roughly a third of the country for fascism. We have the most corrupt Supreme Court in the history of the country supporting and enabling Trump, making it difficult if not impossible to hold him accountable for his flagrant violations of US Laws and the Constitution.

Since John Verveake was brought up, his 'Awakening From The Meaning Crisis' series on YouTube is an excellent place to start. Good example of how one can use thier academic training and credentials to speak to people on a substantive issues outside of academia.

Problem is that low-information voters who haven't been following politics are likely to have a mindset that thier day-to-day life didn't change all that drastically last time Trump was president. As a result, they're also likely to think that our warnings about Trump's dangerous plans are overblown (many people living in early 1930s thought the same thing about Hitler, thinking that he wouldn't be able to sustain his radicalism once he was brought into the government). They aren't able to see how thier day-to-day observations connect to the broader social context in which that experience takes place; if they were able to, they wouldn't be on the fence or undecided.

@Leo Gura Tell me this isn't effective messaging for apolitical normies who haven't been following what's been going on with Trump and Project 2025.

You know that. And I know that. It's obvious to any minimally informed person. But to the lowest common denominator, apolitical low-information voter (who's not already voting for Trump), the 'weirdo' rhetoric seems to be working. So I say go with it - since it's not wrong, and it complimentary to pointing out how dangerous and brainwashed Christian Nationalists are. They're dangerous weirdos.

Best possible choice for a VP pick. Popular progressive governor. A military veteran and labor advocate who's very likable, and gets bonus points for starting the trend of calling Trump and the Christian Nationalists 'weirdos'.

Somewhat shockingly, the SCOTUS isn't using the recent Immunity Ruling to obstruct Trump's sentencing for his 34 felony convictions, which will take place before the end of the month. While no one is expecting serious prison time for Trump, a suspended jail sentence or house arrest could hurt his ability to campaign. https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-supreme-court-declines-halt-trumps-sentencing-hush-money-case-2024-08-05/

Think of it like this - Weimer democracy was born born in the shadow of a traumatic military defeat, and the military dictatorship that ran Germany during WW1 basically did everything in their power to strangle Germany's new democracy in the crib. Agenda item one on that list was that Germany's military leadership wanted to avoid responsibility for losing the war (and to be clear, it was their strategic decisions that lost the war). To that end, they hid how badly the war was actually going from the German public, and made sure that it was the new democracy - and not the military autocracy ran by Hindenburg and Ludendorff - that had to sign the punitive peace treaty with the allies. Even more cynically, they knowingly spread bogus conspiracy theories that Germany lost the war because the army was 'stabbed in the back' by traitors on the home front (referring to Jews and socialists). Much of the German public was willing to believe this because when the war ended, allied troops were not occupying German territory (and again, remember that the military dictatorship was misleading the public about how badly the war was going. The Germany military was on the verge of collapse when the armistice was finally signed). Additionally, German Courts were largely filled with loyalists to the old regime which didn't believe in Weimer democracy, and gave right-wing terrorists (like Hitler) a slap on the wrist for trying to overthrow the government in the 20s, while handing out much harsher punishment to leftists who commited crimes. Part of the 'deal with the devil' of the Weimer government was in preserving elements of the old regime, to get enough of the population on board to form a national government. In addition to this, the Weimer constitution had some structural flaws that helped to sow the seeds of its own destruction. The most devastating of these flaws was Article 48, which gave the president dictatorial powers in the event of an emergency (Hitler would use this to end all civil rights in response to the Reichstag Fire early in the Nazi's reign). Additionally, a highly representative parliamentary system brought with it unintended instability, since no single party was ever able to form a majority government, forcing parties to rely on forming coalitions to actually govern. Sounds great in theory, but in the final years of the Weimer government, the largest two parties were the Nazis and the Communists - two parties which didn't believe in democracy, and couldn't work together. And yes, having to pay huge punitive war reparations made this already difficult situation much worse. Specifically, it made Germany much more vulnerable to the Great Depression.

So I think your heuristics here are solid. My only asterisk is that subjective values and preferences aren't hermeneutically sealed - the biological, cultural, and technological context sets the horizons for subjective preference formation (for instance, someone living in Ancient Athens literally wouldn't have access to certain forms of preference formation for things like trans rights, online privacy, etc).

Tldr; MAGA election deniers are being put on election boards in swing states across the country, who are planning to refuse to certify the 2024 election results if Trump loses, based on bogus claims of fraud. While anyone who's familiar with Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election shouldn't be surprised by this, it's an incredibly dangerous development. Most of the Republicans who weren't willing to break the law to keep Trump in power have been removed from the Republican Party since 2020, replaced with MAGA cronies who are willing and eager to assist Trump in his coup. More people getting out to Vote, and Trump losing by wider margins in counties with MAGA election deniers on election boards will make this coup less likely to succeed. Additionally, the Department of Justice needs to be ruthless in prosecuting attempts at election interference.

Fortunately, I'm more than willing to a concede a valid point that's well articulated, so yeah, i'll cop to some inconsistency in my use of 'beauty' as an example (since, as you point out, beauty is at some level informed by a shared biological context, just as I'm claiming that morals are). Hard agree here. The perspective you're alluding to (that both you and I disagree with) is called 'language prescriptivism', by the way - which is the normative view that words have one precisely defined semantic meaning that's 'correct'. Suffice to say I think you bring up some valid points, that I'll respond to more fully after thinking about them some more.

@zurew I think we mostly agree with one another, we're just using somewhat different semantics for some key terms. As far moral theories go, on one end you have perenialism (the idea that there's a fixed/essential human nature). And on the other end you have radical forms of constructivism (which often come with the assumption that human nature is fluid and largely socially constructed). My own moral theory is grounded in a middle point between these two poles, arguing that morality is grounded in a shared biological context - and that morality is culturally / socially constructed. Biology sets the bounds for what can be constructed. It could be argued that this is a 'weak' rather than a 'strong' version of constructivism, or that its an attempted synthesis between these two poles. And yeah, I'll admit that my moral theory isn't completely descriptive, as there are metrics I care about (human flourishing) which can't be defined in an impartial way. Fair point. Maybe leans descriptive would be more apt? (Of course, just because a theory is descriptive doesn't mean that it 's necessarily 'correct' in what it's describing). For subjectivism, basically everything we do and interact with is mind-dependent at some level, so I don't find 'mind-dependent' to be all that helpful. (Let me know if this is a mischaracterization of your semantics). Even the Laws of Physics are inherently coupled to human interests and capacities (in essence, they're a pattern recognition framework for human beings). Material objects that we interact with in the everyday world are mentally constructed (we don't sit on a lump of meaningless, uninterpreted matter - we sit on a chair). (Note that 'mentally constructed' does not mean 'imaginary', or that what's being referred to 'does not exist') In my mind I've found 'decided by an individual's whims, preferences, and individual understanding' to be a more useful description of subjectivity. So by my semantics 'beauty' would fall under the realm of the 'subjective'. Morals (again by my semantics) would have a subjective component, but wouldn't be completely subjective - since they're grounded in biological mechanisms and a cultural context that's outside of an individual's whims, preferences, and personalized understanding.

She's %100 right. The relevant point is that in our current era, literally a third of the country believes the Big Lie that the last election was illegitimate, and are ready to justify and support a coup with little to no reservations. So while Republicans have been trying to game the system and see what they can get away with as far as giving themselves unfair advantages, they've never been more emboldened than they are right now. So we have to be ready for them

Moral constructivism, as I use the term, is a recognition that morality is always grounded in a biological, cultural, and personal context. It's a descriptive (rather than prescriptive) antirealitist approach to morality. Here are some of its core tenets: 1) Morality is largely intuition driven, and only secondarily about rational deliberation. 2) There is an evolutionary context for our moral intuitions, having to do with the survival situations that were in place as human psychology was evolving. For most of our history, human beings lived in tribes where you would know your neighbors on a face-to-face basis; this was where our root level moral intuitions evolved. Living alongside strangers as a fact of life only came much later. 3) Morality is functional rather than objective - as social animals, its purpose is to let us have functional societies. It's shaped by biology, culture, and and an individual's life experience. Morality doesn't exist 'out there' in some external Reality, but neither is it fully subjective. 4) Though humans have a shared pool of moral intuitions, they get expressed differently depending on the social and cultural context. in fact, I'd go so far as to say that moral constructivism is inherently anti-essentialist in nature, while at the same time rejecting extreme forms of relativism as well. 5) Morality is constructed in the sense that it's created and sustained by human minds, but that doesn't mean it's arbitrary, or that its effects aren't very real. Morality may be constructed, but that doesn't mean that 'anything goes'; or that all moral viewpoints are equally healthy. ______________________ In essence, it's a viewpoint that does allow for moral progress, but in the sense that there are better and worse lived outcomes for human beings. Moral constructivism stands in contrast to the supposition that our moral ideas are correct or incorrect to the extent that they correspond with Transcendental (ie, fixed and absolute) moral principles.

I'd agree with this, though more in a descriptive rather than prescriptive way ( I didn't necessarily set out to construct an antirealist theory). Definitely a moral constructivist, but too often I find that people equate 'constructed' with arbitrary or subjective. If anything, I'm more interested in reclaiming subjectivism and objectivism away from metaphysical realism (in ethics and in other domains). And emphasizing that these are human constructs that can still be useful to us, so long was we do don't insist that they're inherent features of Reality, independent of any thinking beings.

The type of metatheory that I'm developing is meant to be complimentary to other perspectives, rather than THE one-true framework for every situation and context. It's primary emphasis is on how we interpret our everyday experience - in particular, it calls attention to the unexamined assumptions we normally attach to that experience. As far as that goes, the emphasis is on learning to hold our frameworks in a more self aware and ultimately provisional way, by cultivating an acute awareness of thier limitations. To that end, I argue for thinking about theories less in terms of transcendental or absolute 'truth', and more in terms of thier appropriateness for given purposive context. In other words, thinking about theories in terms of what we're trying to understand. Additionally, I do argue that completely explicit formal rules for theory selection are impractical, because one quickly runs into an infinite regression problem (since we would also need rules for when and how to apply the rules, ad-infinitum ). As far as what makes something a good 'fit' for a given situation on context, nothing really unexpected or novel here. Solid heuristics include things like relevance, simplicity, internal coherence, and explainability. In addition to these, I'd also add: 'do not bar the path of inquiry' (that is, we should be cautious about adopting theories that prevent us from discovering something that could turn out to be true). The 'pivot', then, is more about examining the emotional attachments that we form to our theories and beliefs. In particular, when our beliefs become our identity.

Could you describe what you mean by 'theoretical virtues'? Short answer to your second question : Of the categories you listed, 'pragmatism' would probably be the closest fit. Longer answer: The theory of truth that I'm working with is a Disclosive Theory of Truth that emphasizes how explicit beliefs are derived from nonconceptual familiarity with the world, which we attain through everyday practices and activities. (Think of Heideggerian ontology and epistemology, alongside a Ken Wilber-esque emphasis that perspectives can be 'true but partial', and a AN Whitehead emphasis on 'process' and 'relationality', if that's at all helpful). In particular, it's a rejection of the Correspondence View in favor of a phenomenological and embodied perspective towards truth, with insights from evolutionary biology.