@Joe Carter, Jason, if you admit that the existence of the world is not necessary, then no induction is needed. But just for the sake of argument, can you present an example (from the history of philosophy) of someone arguing that because observable things have causes, then there must be a first cause, or some approximation of such? It's not present in Aquinas' third way, or in Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason. So I'm wondering where you find the induction.
@Joe Carter, Even if we agree that it is not based on materialism (and most, if not all contemporary compatibilism is based on physicalism at least), then the fact that there are coherent philosophical versions of compatibilism by physicalists/materialists is still undeniable. You may disagree, and may even have arguments against them (and there are several versions, so you'll need several arguments), but it's not a given that materialism or physicalism are incompatible with free will. This is a conclusion, not an argument.
@Joe Carter, Joe, compatibilism is the position that materialism (or physicalism) and freedom are not incompatible. If it's a coherent position, then compatibilism is compatible with materialism by definition. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's not obviously false. Compatibilism.
While I'm not sure that most people are proper materialists (as opposed to physicalists), even proper materialism doesn't necessarily preclude free will. Compatibilism is not an incoherent philosphical position.
Jason, in referring to "first-cause" arguments, I assume you mean Aristotle and the Christian cosmological arguments, in which case, it is not the case that they are in the least bit inductive (that is, your 1. above is false). They are quite explicitly deductive: they move from the concept of contingency, namely that the existence of things is not necessary (there could be nothing, or things could not exist), which is not inductive, to the position that there must be a necessary, or non-contingent (or in Joe's terminology, non-dependent) existence. It is an assumption, though an analytical, not an inductive one, that the world's existence is contingent, and as I mentioned in another comment, this has been a point of dispute in philosophy for more than two thousand years, but neither position is incoherent or inductive.
Your point number 2 is also a conceptual issue, and has nothing to do with induction. Anselm, for example, or at least those who've interpreted Anselm for the last 900 or so years, argue in such a way that there can be only one non-contingent (or necessary, or non-dependent, or redundantly, unconditionally non-dependent) being, because a necessary being has to be perfect, or at least more perfect than any other being that can be conceived. Again, this is a conceptual, a priori, analytic position, not an inductive one. That premise is pretty hard to dispute, too. That is, there's nothing wrong with it conceptually. Where the disputes arise is generally on the issue of whether such a necessary being is possible, and there are all sorts of ways of approaching that from both sides. However, those are all conceptual approaches, which is to say, this is not an inductive issue either.
Your point 3 is of course a matter of theology, and since the Christian God is, obviously, uncaused, it seems like a strange point of argument. Whether such a God exists is a point of contention, but the Christian God, conceptually, is uncaused.
@Pat Cahalan, Pat, you never made the error. A lot of classical logicians reject the premise of the atheist outright because they’ve been trained all their life to look at arguments in the form of P implies Q, and the immediate objection is: lack of evidence does not prove non existence.
But the not-P argument is still logically valid if one accepts the premise that the default assumptions are all negative, rather than positive.
None of this really follows. ~P ⊃ ~ Q works the same way, logically, as P ⊃ Q. That is, ~P ⊃ ~Q also implies that Q ⊃ ~~P (modus tollens, but doesn't imply ~Q ⊃ P (affirming the consequent), and so on. Logicians know this, of course, and to show that any positive statement can be turned into a negative, and vice versa, is a trivial procedure. That’s why the old canard that you can’t prove a negative is obviously false, for example. You’re not really arguing against the logicians here, present or past, as you’d be hard pressed to find one who makes the argument you attribute to them.
Evidence is really a separate matter. No evidence for a proposition does not alone imply (logically or empirically or whatever) that a proposition is false. It just means that there’s no evidence for the proposition. What’s more, evidence for a proposition does not logically imply that it is true.
It’s interesting that Joe brings out the “no true atheists” trope in his first post, claiming that atheism is ultimately “incoherent” (at least as much as it implies the lack of a “non-dependent reality”). Charity bids me to assume that, instead of simply dismissing his opponents’ beliefs out of hand, as it might appear to anyone who’s been around these sorts of discussions long enough, Joe has in fact solved one of the most difficult and persistent antimonies, as Kant called them (this was actually one of his antimonies of pure reason), of western philosophy, namely whether the world (universe, reality, whatever) has its origin in something non-contingent (uncaused, etc.), or is in fact eternal and without a first cause. I look forward to his description of his solution. If he is simply denying the existence of his opponents’ position, well, I guess we all know how much is likely to come from this debate.
By the way, you know you’re in for a fruitless debate on religion when one of the debaters uses the phrase “unconditionally non-dependent” (which is sort of like saying “obesely fat”), the other doesn’t recognize the idea of “non-dependence,” which is pretty much central to Christian philosophy (it’s usually described as non-contingent these days, though, and it’s at the heart of both the ontological and one of the two major versions of the cosmological argument), and the comments begin with a debate about whether modus tollens is true (with one of the deniers of modus tollens, a lawyer no less, confusing it with “affirming the consequent”), though I guess this last bit is not surprising. Seriously, this is a mess.
@Robert Cheeks, Yeah, I get that there are scholars who argue these points (though the Ebionite theory is pretty out there, and it's the Jewish, not the gnostic Ebionites that are implicated, I believe), but it's far from "obvious," and you haven't said how any of that implies a "represents a violent, gnostic, derailment."
Also, when was the last time you read a book by someone other than Veogelin?
@Robert Cheeks, How is it obvious? And how does any of that follow? Claiming that things that are, to put it mildly, at the fringe historical scholarship are obvious is odd enough, but then drawing unrelated conclusions from them as though they were self-evident is even odder.
@Robert Cheeks, "Inherent in the structure of noetic existence is the idea that something exists in the non-existent reality." Hahaha... That was an awesome bit of meaningless/bungled quoting-without-attribution.
But if you fix it up to say what Voegelin was actually saying when he writes something like, "I have tried to show that the knowledge of the something that 'exists' beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence," then part of Taylor's point, I take it, is to argue that this was so, but with the advent of new ways of seeing the world, it is no longer the case, or at least, it isn't necessarily the case.
But man, I did love the attempt to look like you smart or sumthin'.
With essential projects, contractors become the agents in a principal-agent problem. They’re difficult to control; they know more than you do; and they have a personal profit motive.
This isn't really about this project in particular, but a couple years ago, at my state university, contractors were hired to do some rennovations in my department's (3-year old) building. They took up a whole wing of the 3rd floor, and it was rather intrusive (our weekly area colloquia were held in that wing), so one day while getting my mail (the mail room was also in that wing), I asked one of the construction supervisors how long they were going to be there. His answer was, "Until the money runs out."
Of course, now the university is in dire financial straights, laying people off left and right, and cutting programs. I can't imagine how that ever happened.
@Andy Smith, Massive modularity, which most Evolutionary Psychology assumes, is improbable, given what we know about the brain (Patricia Churchland says it’s impossible), but even if one believes that the brain is massively modular, one can reject Evolutionary Psychology for a whole host of reasons. Hell, Fodor himself rejects it, though his reasons are bizarre. The truth is, most of empirical psychology rejects Evolutionary Psychology, because it’s methodologically and theoretically inferior to most of empirical psychology. And I won’t even say what biologists think of Evolutionary Psychology, except to note that when referring to it, they tend not to use nice words.
And Pinker does good research. He just doesn’t do research in Evolutionary Psychology (or much of it), as he’s a psycholinguist by training.
@Andy Smith, Not at length here, no. Suffice it to say that I'm not confusing "the popular view of evolutionary psychology" with the actual science. I am trying to avoid confusing one type of evolutionary psychology, in the Tooby-Cosmides-Buss-Pinker mold (Pinker doesn't do much actual research in E.P., but is instead a popularizer), and a broader conception of psychology that considers evolutionary theory and history (e.g., the sort of comparative psychology that Marc Hauser does when he’s not making up data). That's why I, in keeping with a convention that has been around for a few years, refer to Evolutionary Psychology (with initial capitals) and evolutionary psychology, as distinct things, the former being the T-C-B-P type. Evolutionary Psychology is the sort described in the http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html”>Evolutionary Psychology Primer, and defined primarily by its position that “our modern skulls house a stone age mind,” that much/most of our behavior is the result of modules developed in the stone age Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, and by its use, with one real exception (Tooby and Cosmides use of a single method over 20+years), of non-experimental methods (e.g., Buss mostly uses surveys), and a generally poor grasp of evolutionary theory. This version is, thankfully, dying a slow death within academia. The other version, evolutionary psychology, is just psychology as it has been done for a while, combining various subfields like cognitive, social, developmental, and comparative psychology with a knowledge of evolutionary theory (actual evolutionary theory, as opposed to the perversion of evolutionary theory used in Evolutionary Psychology). Evolutionary Psychology (not evolutionary psychology) is shit science, period.
I hesitate to say this for various reasons, but this is the sort of pulled-out-of-the ass (but hinting at some superficial knowledge of actual theory and research), overly simplistic, quasi-social scientific claptrap that a certain breed of American liberal/progressive, one that is particularly common in the blogosphere (educated, worldly, “Type A” all the way, but not exceptionally bright), absolutely loves. That’s not to say that conservatives don’t have their equally wacky, though perhaps significantly more pernicious, equivalents, it’s just that this breed of “liberals are like x, while conservatives are like y” has enjoyed a fair amount of popularity among liberals/progressives since at least the Lakoff craze of 2004. And this, it strikes me, isn’t even the most offensive (to conservatives) version of this trend. It wasn’t uncommon a few years ago, even among some of the science blogosphere (one particular science blogger, whose name rhymes with Dora, was particularly bad about this), to hear from some liberals that research showed that conservatism was a mental disorder. Now the research showed no such thing, and you had to throw in a—pardon the pun—liberal dose of this sort of nonsense to get to that position, but once you set out in that direction, the temptation to feel that villainizing your opponents is just good science can be too strong to resist. What I find truly odd about it, though, is that these tend to be the same people who rail against Evolutionary Psychology (with capital letters) because it tends to just confirm popular prejudice, yet they have no problem accepting similar reasoning when it’s their (elite?) prejudice that’s being confirmed. Evolutionary Psychology really is shit science, largely because of the way it reasons about the mind and behavior, but that sort of reasoning about the mind and behavior doesn’t become less shitty because it’s no longer telling us the world is like it looked in 1950s television shows, but instead is more like it looks in an episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
I should add that, as long as it’s merely confirming liberal prejudice and goes no further, it’s probably harmless, because only liberals will care (except for the conservatives who stop in, and who are enraged, enraged I tell you, which they would have been anyway), and everyone everywhere has their pet methods for confirming the belief that we’re better than they are in all of the ways that we think we are. I was a bit worried back when Lakoff had the ear of prominent politicians, but since his 15 minutes have now been up for some time, I think we can rest assured that this will remain a blogospheric phenomenon with no real practical implications.
@MFarmer, if you don't know what I am talking about, then you don't know anything about gentrification.
We're against it, many of us at least, because of its effects on the low income residents of areas that are targeted for gentrification. And I doubt my income history is relevant to that.
Hitchens I have less of a beef with, though in public he makes some pretty strange assertions about the history of religion. I feel even less offended by Dennett, though I think he gets some of the psychology wrong -- his understanding of science always seems to be on the level of someone who reads Discover or watches PBS; he is, as Nagel once described him, "Gilbert Ryle meets Scientific American."
It's Dawkins and Harris that are the real offenders. Dawkins pretty much dismisses theology and philosophy, for example, and when Harris is confronted with actual research that contradicts his armchair reasoning, he just puts his hands over his ears and screams "nah nah nah nah nah nah" (see, e.g., the exchange between Harris and Atran at one of the Beyond Belief conferences a few years ago; the video's on the web somewhere).
Jason, back in the day, I was one of those who criticized Dawkins et al. for their ignorance, and I stand by that criticism, and nothing in these survey results could make me change my mind, because they're not really relevant to the criticisms I and others were using back then, namely that, sure, they may know more about religion in general, and perhaps even Christianity, than the average Chrsitian, but the average Christian isn't writing a book saying that these are the reasons why we should believe, while Dawkins et al. were writing several telling us that these are the reasons why we shouldn't. If you're going to do that, then knowing more than the average bear isn't worth much, and anyone who does know more than the average bear and has read Dawkins on theology or Harris on suicide bombing, e.g., knows that their knowledge of theology, history, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, as they relate to religion, is pretty damn limited
RTod, I'm not dismissing it, I'm simply pointing out that it's not what people mean when they say that "New Atheists" don't know much about religion. Of course, most of those people (me included, and I'm an "Old Atheist") would also say that the religious don't know much about religion, including their own, and we wouldn't feel like we had to apologize for saying that because White Protestants did better than any other group on the Christianity questions.
@Jason Kuznicki, Sure, if this survey showed anything like that. For it to do so, a.) most atheists would have to be "New Atheists," which is almost certainly not the case, and b.) the survey itself would have to test some deep knowledge of religion.
I don't think anyone has ever said that "New Atheists" don't know that they, themselves, don't believe in God, Ramadan is a Muslim holy month, Mother Theresa was a Catholic, or that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. If this is "knowing a lot about religion," then I suspect most "New Atheists" do, in fact, know a lot about religion, but in that case, knowing a lot about religion is pretty cheap.
David, can you point to some of the liberals or even conservative mosque proponents (I assumethat if there are a lot of them, at least some of them have blogs) who argue as you claim? I mean, I’ve seen plenty talk about how arguing that the cultural center is offensive because it signals victory for Muslim terrorists, or celebrates the people who attacked us, assumes that all Muslims are the same as the terrorists, or at least support terrorists. They also often point out that this is about as classic an example of bigotry as you’ll find. However, I haven’t seen any simply argue that it’s not offensive, so there! Or anything close to that.
I don't mean this as a defense of Kaufmann, but Leiter's criticisms are almost universally exaggerated at best and completely unfair at worst. And while Anglo-American interpretations of Nietzsche, largely from within the analytict tradition, certainly dominate the literature now, that's as much because they dominate the literature period. Leiter's Nietzsche is a naturalist, obsessed with and dominated by contemporary scientist. This is convenient, coming from a bunch of philosophers in a naturalist-dominated philosophical tradition. Not saying that Nietzsche didn't have a naturalist streak, just that the history of Nietzsche scholarship is the history of people seeing what they want to see in Nieztsche, making it difficult not to be skeptical of this sort of convenience.
Also, it's clear Steorts has little knowledge of Schopenhauer (who played a big role in making Europeans pay attention to Eastern thought in the 19th century), in addition to Nietzsche. Though the Buddhist nonsense means he must have at least read about Parkes.
Also, whatever the scholarly worth of Kaufmann's translations, they remain the most fun to read. Oh, and I loved his intro to Buber as well.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Debate: Joe Carter’s Opening Argument (Updated with my reply)”
@Joe Carter, Jason, if you admit that the existence of the world is not necessary, then no induction is needed. But just for the sake of argument, can you present an example (from the history of philosophy) of someone arguing that because observable things have causes, then there must be a first cause, or some approximation of such? It's not present in Aquinas' third way, or in Leibniz' principle of sufficient reason. So I'm wondering where you find the induction.
"
@Joe Carter, Even if we agree that it is not based on materialism (and most, if not all contemporary compatibilism is based on physicalism at least), then the fact that there are coherent philosophical versions of compatibilism by physicalists/materialists is still undeniable. You may disagree, and may even have arguments against them (and there are several versions, so you'll need several arguments), but it's not a given that materialism or physicalism are incompatible with free will. This is a conclusion, not an argument.
"
@Joe Carter, Joe, compatibilism is the position that materialism (or physicalism) and freedom are not incompatible. If it's a coherent position, then compatibilism is compatible with materialism by definition. That doesn't mean it's true, but it's not obviously false. Compatibilism.
"
While I'm not sure that most people are proper materialists (as opposed to physicalists), even proper materialism doesn't necessarily preclude free will. Compatibilism is not an incoherent philosphical position.
"
Jason, in referring to "first-cause" arguments, I assume you mean Aristotle and the Christian cosmological arguments, in which case, it is not the case that they are in the least bit inductive (that is, your 1. above is false). They are quite explicitly deductive: they move from the concept of contingency, namely that the existence of things is not necessary (there could be nothing, or things could not exist), which is not inductive, to the position that there must be a necessary, or non-contingent (or in Joe's terminology, non-dependent) existence. It is an assumption, though an analytical, not an inductive one, that the world's existence is contingent, and as I mentioned in another comment, this has been a point of dispute in philosophy for more than two thousand years, but neither position is incoherent or inductive.
Your point number 2 is also a conceptual issue, and has nothing to do with induction. Anselm, for example, or at least those who've interpreted Anselm for the last 900 or so years, argue in such a way that there can be only one non-contingent (or necessary, or non-dependent, or redundantly, unconditionally non-dependent) being, because a necessary being has to be perfect, or at least more perfect than any other being that can be conceived. Again, this is a conceptual, a priori, analytic position, not an inductive one. That premise is pretty hard to dispute, too. That is, there's nothing wrong with it conceptually. Where the disputes arise is generally on the issue of whether such a necessary being is possible, and there are all sorts of ways of approaching that from both sides. However, those are all conceptual approaches, which is to say, this is not an inductive issue either.
Your point 3 is of course a matter of theology, and since the Christian God is, obviously, uncaused, it seems like a strange point of argument. Whether such a God exists is a point of contention, but the Christian God, conceptually, is uncaused.
"
@Pat Cahalan, Pat, you never made the error.
A lot of classical logicians reject the premise of the atheist outright because they’ve been trained all their life to look at arguments in the form of P implies Q, and the immediate objection is: lack of evidence does not prove non existence.
But the not-P argument is still logically valid if one accepts the premise that the default assumptions are all negative, rather than positive.
None of this really follows. ~P ⊃ ~ Q works the same way, logically, as P ⊃ Q. That is, ~P ⊃ ~Q also implies that Q ⊃ ~~P (modus tollens, but doesn't imply ~Q ⊃ P (affirming the consequent), and so on. Logicians know this, of course, and to show that any positive statement can be turned into a negative, and vice versa, is a trivial procedure. That’s why the old canard that you can’t prove a negative is obviously false, for example. You’re not really arguing against the logicians here, present or past, as you’d be hard pressed to find one who makes the argument you attribute to them.
Evidence is really a separate matter. No evidence for a proposition does not alone imply (logically or empirically or whatever) that a proposition is false. It just means that there’s no evidence for the proposition. What’s more, evidence for a proposition does not logically imply that it is true.
"
@Transplanted Lawyer, Didn't mean to imply that you didn't acknowledge it. That doesn't change anything I said though.
"
It’s interesting that Joe brings out the “no true atheists” trope in his first post, claiming that atheism is ultimately “incoherent” (at least as much as it implies the lack of a “non-dependent reality”). Charity bids me to assume that, instead of simply dismissing his opponents’ beliefs out of hand, as it might appear to anyone who’s been around these sorts of discussions long enough, Joe has in fact solved one of the most difficult and persistent antimonies, as Kant called them (this was actually one of his antimonies of pure reason), of western philosophy, namely whether the world (universe, reality, whatever) has its origin in something non-contingent (uncaused, etc.), or is in fact eternal and without a first cause. I look forward to his description of his solution. If he is simply denying the existence of his opponents’ position, well, I guess we all know how much is likely to come from this debate.
By the way, you know you’re in for a fruitless debate on religion when one of the debaters uses the phrase “unconditionally non-dependent” (which is sort of like saying “obesely fat”), the other doesn’t recognize the idea of “non-dependence,” which is pretty much central to Christian philosophy (it’s usually described as non-contingent these days, though, and it’s at the heart of both the ontological and one of the two major versions of the cosmological argument), and the comments begin with a debate about whether modus tollens is true (with one of the deniers of modus tollens, a lawyer no less, confusing it with “affirming the consequent”), though I guess this last bit is not surprising. Seriously, this is a mess.
On “Obama does the Daily Show”
I figured Obama was making a Bush joke (remember his "heckuvajob" comment)? And The Daily Show audience would get that.
On “Anti-Muslim Bigotry & Double Standards”
@Robert Cheeks, Yeah, I get that there are scholars who argue these points (though the Ebionite theory is pretty out there, and it's the Jewish, not the gnostic Ebionites that are implicated, I believe), but it's far from "obvious," and you haven't said how any of that implies a "represents a violent, gnostic, derailment."
Also, when was the last time you read a book by someone other than Veogelin?
"
@Robert Cheeks, How is it obvious? And how does any of that follow? Claiming that things that are, to put it mildly, at the fringe historical scholarship are obvious is odd enough, but then drawing unrelated conclusions from them as though they were self-evident is even odder.
On “Charles Taylor Thursday #2: Against subtraction stories.”
@Robert Cheeks, "Inherent in the structure of noetic existence is the idea that something exists in the non-existent reality." Hahaha... That was an awesome bit of meaningless/bungled quoting-without-attribution.
But if you fix it up to say what Voegelin was actually saying when he writes something like, "I have tried to show that the knowledge of the something that 'exists' beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence," then part of Taylor's point, I take it, is to argue that this was so, but with the advent of new ways of seeing the world, it is no longer the case, or at least, it isn't necessarily the case.
But man, I did love the attempt to look like you smart or sumthin'.
On “Christie and Infrastructure Folly”
@Jason Kuznicki,
With essential projects, contractors become the agents in a principal-agent problem. They’re difficult to control; they know more than you do; and they have a personal profit motive.
This isn't really about this project in particular, but a couple years ago, at my state university, contractors were hired to do some rennovations in my department's (3-year old) building. They took up a whole wing of the 3rd floor, and it was rather intrusive (our weekly area colloquia were held in that wing), so one day while getting my mail (the mail room was also in that wing), I asked one of the construction supervisors how long they were going to be there. His answer was, "Until the money runs out."
Of course, now the university is in dire financial straights, laying people off left and right, and cutting programs. I can't imagine how that ever happened.
On “False dichotomies: Foragers vs. Farmers edition”
@Andy Smith, Massive modularity, which most Evolutionary Psychology assumes, is improbable, given what we know about the brain (Patricia Churchland says it’s impossible), but even if one believes that the brain is massively modular, one can reject Evolutionary Psychology for a whole host of reasons. Hell, Fodor himself rejects it, though his reasons are bizarre. The truth is, most of empirical psychology rejects Evolutionary Psychology, because it’s methodologically and theoretically inferior to most of empirical psychology. And I won’t even say what biologists think of Evolutionary Psychology, except to note that when referring to it, they tend not to use nice words.
And Pinker does good research. He just doesn’t do research in Evolutionary Psychology (or much of it), as he’s a psycholinguist by training.
"
@Chris, Sorry about the html issues there.
"
@Andy Smith, Not at length here, no. Suffice it to say that I'm not confusing "the popular view of evolutionary psychology" with the actual science. I am trying to avoid confusing one type of evolutionary psychology, in the Tooby-Cosmides-Buss-Pinker mold (Pinker doesn't do much actual research in E.P., but is instead a popularizer), and a broader conception of psychology that considers evolutionary theory and history (e.g., the sort of comparative psychology that Marc Hauser does when he’s not making up data). That's why I, in keeping with a convention that has been around for a few years, refer to Evolutionary Psychology (with initial capitals) and evolutionary psychology, as distinct things, the former being the T-C-B-P type. Evolutionary Psychology is the sort described in the http://www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html”>Evolutionary Psychology Primer, and defined primarily by its position that “our modern skulls house a stone age mind,” that much/most of our behavior is the result of modules developed in the stone age Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, and by its use, with one real exception (Tooby and Cosmides use of a single method over 20+years), of non-experimental methods (e.g., Buss mostly uses surveys), and a generally poor grasp of evolutionary theory. This version is, thankfully, dying a slow death within academia. The other version, evolutionary psychology, is just psychology as it has been done for a while, combining various subfields like cognitive, social, developmental, and comparative psychology with a knowledge of evolutionary theory (actual evolutionary theory, as opposed to the perversion of evolutionary theory used in Evolutionary Psychology). Evolutionary Psychology (not evolutionary psychology) is shit science, period.
"
I hesitate to say this for various reasons, but this is the sort of pulled-out-of-the ass (but hinting at some superficial knowledge of actual theory and research), overly simplistic, quasi-social scientific claptrap that a certain breed of American liberal/progressive, one that is particularly common in the blogosphere (educated, worldly, “Type A” all the way, but not exceptionally bright), absolutely loves. That’s not to say that conservatives don’t have their equally wacky, though perhaps significantly more pernicious, equivalents, it’s just that this breed of “liberals are like x, while conservatives are like y” has enjoyed a fair amount of popularity among liberals/progressives since at least the Lakoff craze of 2004. And this, it strikes me, isn’t even the most offensive (to conservatives) version of this trend. It wasn’t uncommon a few years ago, even among some of the science blogosphere (one particular science blogger, whose name rhymes with Dora, was particularly bad about this), to hear from some liberals that research showed that conservatism was a mental disorder. Now the research showed no such thing, and you had to throw in a—pardon the pun—liberal dose of this sort of nonsense to get to that position, but once you set out in that direction, the temptation to feel that villainizing your opponents is just good science can be too strong to resist. What I find truly odd about it, though, is that these tend to be the same people who rail against Evolutionary Psychology (with capital letters) because it tends to just confirm popular prejudice, yet they have no problem accepting similar reasoning when it’s their (elite?) prejudice that’s being confirmed. Evolutionary Psychology really is shit science, largely because of the way it reasons about the mind and behavior, but that sort of reasoning about the mind and behavior doesn’t become less shitty because it’s no longer telling us the world is like it looked in 1950s television shows, but instead is more like it looks in an episode of Countdown with Keith Olbermann.
I should add that, as long as it’s merely confirming liberal prejudice and goes no further, it’s probably harmless, because only liberals will care (except for the conservatives who stop in, and who are enraged, enraged I tell you, which they would have been anyway), and everyone everywhere has their pet methods for confirming the belief that we’re better than they are in all of the ways that we think we are. I was a bit worried back when Lakoff had the ear of prominent politicians, but since his 15 minutes have now been up for some time, I think we can rest assured that this will remain a blogospheric phenomenon with no real practical implications.
On “John Waters on Dive Bars, Perverts, Pasolini, and Levi Johnston”
@MFarmer, if you don't know what I am talking about, then you don't know anything about gentrification.
We're against it, many of us at least, because of its effects on the low income residents of areas that are targeted for gentrification. And I doubt my income history is relevant to that.
"
@MFarmer, yeah, screw the poor! What have they ever done for anyone?
On “That’s me in the corner, choosing my religion”
@RTod,
OK, the Borders thing is funny.
Hitchens I have less of a beef with, though in public he makes some pretty strange assertions about the history of religion. I feel even less offended by Dennett, though I think he gets some of the psychology wrong -- his understanding of science always seems to be on the level of someone who reads Discover or watches PBS; he is, as Nagel once described him, "Gilbert Ryle meets Scientific American."
It's Dawkins and Harris that are the real offenders. Dawkins pretty much dismisses theology and philosophy, for example, and when Harris is confronted with actual research that contradicts his armchair reasoning, he just puts his hands over his ears and screams "nah nah nah nah nah nah" (see, e.g., the exchange between Harris and Atran at one of the Beyond Belief conferences a few years ago; the video's on the web somewhere).
"
Jason, back in the day, I was one of those who criticized Dawkins et al. for their ignorance, and I stand by that criticism, and nothing in these survey results could make me change my mind, because they're not really relevant to the criticisms I and others were using back then, namely that, sure, they may know more about religion in general, and perhaps even Christianity, than the average Chrsitian, but the average Christian isn't writing a book saying that these are the reasons why we should believe, while Dawkins et al. were writing several telling us that these are the reasons why we shouldn't. If you're going to do that, then knowing more than the average bear isn't worth much, and anyone who does know more than the average bear and has read Dawkins on theology or Harris on suicide bombing, e.g., knows that their knowledge of theology, history, psychology, sociology, and philosophy, as they relate to religion, is pretty damn limited
"
RTod, I'm not dismissing it, I'm simply pointing out that it's not what people mean when they say that "New Atheists" don't know much about religion. Of course, most of those people (me included, and I'm an "Old Atheist") would also say that the religious don't know much about religion, including their own, and we wouldn't feel like we had to apologize for saying that because White Protestants did better than any other group on the Christianity questions.
"
@Jason Kuznicki, Sure, if this survey showed anything like that. For it to do so, a.) most atheists would have to be "New Atheists," which is almost certainly not the case, and b.) the survey itself would have to test some deep knowledge of religion.
I don't think anyone has ever said that "New Atheists" don't know that they, themselves, don't believe in God, Ramadan is a Muslim holy month, Mother Theresa was a Catholic, or that the Dalai Lama is Buddhist. If this is "knowing a lot about religion," then I suspect most "New Atheists" do, in fact, know a lot about religion, but in that case, knowing a lot about religion is pretty cheap.
On “The Mosque and the Meta-Debate”
David, can you point to some of the liberals or even conservative mosque proponents (I assumethat if there are a lot of them, at least some of them have blogs) who argue as you claim? I mean, I’ve seen plenty talk about how arguing that the cultural center is offensive because it signals victory for Muslim terrorists, or celebrates the people who attacked us, assumes that all Muslims are the same as the terrorists, or at least support terrorists. They also often point out that this is about as classic an example of bigotry as you’ll find. However, I haven’t seen any simply argue that it’s not offensive, so there! Or anything close to that.
On “The Man Who Pretended to Know Too Much”
I don't mean this as a defense of Kaufmann, but Leiter's criticisms are almost universally exaggerated at best and completely unfair at worst. And while Anglo-American interpretations of Nietzsche, largely from within the analytict tradition, certainly dominate the literature now, that's as much because they dominate the literature period. Leiter's Nietzsche is a naturalist, obsessed with and dominated by contemporary scientist. This is convenient, coming from a bunch of philosophers in a naturalist-dominated philosophical tradition. Not saying that Nietzsche didn't have a naturalist streak, just that the history of Nietzsche scholarship is the history of people seeing what they want to see in Nieztsche, making it difficult not to be skeptical of this sort of convenience.
Also, it's clear Steorts has little knowledge of Schopenhauer (who played a big role in making Europeans pay attention to Eastern thought in the 19th century), in addition to Nietzsche. Though the Buddhist nonsense means he must have at least read about Parkes.
Also, whatever the scholarly worth of Kaufmann's translations, they remain the most fun to read. Oh, and I loved his intro to Buber as well.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.