Philosophical Totalitarianism part 2

Josiah Royce (1855–1916)

Meta:

the real problem you are suffering from what I call sophomore syndrome. that's when people staying philosophy get the names of the schools down real good and they think all think must proceed in narrow strait jackets. Color within the line dont get out of school. real belief real life and philosophy don't work that way.

SG:

I don't spend my time learning the names of the different schools of thought, I spend my time analyzing the advances each school makes and the problems each school has. Existentialist thinkers do little else other than make vague, aesthetic remarks about human existence.

Meta The arguments you make imply that just naming the school an idea comes from is itself a refutation of the idea.

besides all that the idea that modern man has left idealism behind is just bull. First of all reductionism is idealism. so while it seems on the surface that scientisim (the extreme of love to exclusion of real thinking) is opposed to philosophy i8t's really a case of extreme philosophy. Scietnism is very very philosophical and the philosophy it comes out of is idealism. (reduce reality to one thing, that's ideal).

SG:

I think you are very confused about what Idealism entails. Idealism entails that there exists a transcendental realm of being. Pragmatism (use the correct term... scientism is pejorative and silly) is the rejection of such an ideal realm. It, instead, sees the ideal as imaginative and merely directive.

Meta: The views you are exposing are not pragmatism. You want them to be identified with that, but Josiah Royce was a pragmatist and He was also a Hegelian. Some scholars speak of "transcendental Pragmatism" which blows your categories away (see prior link). Some writers speak of They are scientific becuase scientism refers t the extreme lionizing of science, such that scientific knowledge is seen as the only form of knowledge, which is exactly what you have advocated.


SG:

It describes what is potentially possible given a current understanding and is something that is to be tested through experience. Pragmatism is not Utopian nor is it dogmatic in its assertion of truth. What we know is only known through the intelligent relation of practice and theory... using experience to test ideas allows us to form better ideas which in turn allows us to direct experience in a more refined manner in order to develop even more precise ideas. In order to further understand how it works, you only need read the history of scientific discovery. The first experiments are clumsy and imprecise, as are the first hypotheses. As the process goes on, it becomes self-corrective... measurements become less clumsy and more precise, and hypotheses become more far more comprehensive and robust. Practice doesn't make perfect... it doesn't lead to an ideal... it makes better practice.

That's just a justification for ideology. You only allow the questions to be ask that you can answer to your own satisfaction that just creates the illusion that's all there is. Reducing knowledge to what you control is nothing more than an bias, so one ideas comes to dominate all forms of thought. It's self referential and self validating. Something can't help but validate itself when it's the thing there is. Erasing all other view points means you just reduce everything to the only view point you can get the answers you want from.


Meta:

another aspect of idealism that's back is panpsychism which is growing by leaps and bounds.

SG:

Panpsychism is just plain silly. An atom has no mental aspect to it.

Meta: that's a good exampel of what I'm talking aobut. you just create a straw man version of panpsychism so you can rule it out before anyone has a chance to really understanding. No in that schools says that individual atoms have conscoiusness. That argument is analogs to saying water can't be made out of molecules becuase individual molecules aren't wet. Moreover you don't know what atoms don't have conspicuousness. You have no way of knowing it. It doesn't fit your ideology so you just declair it wrong and dont' even bother to consider that fact that you have no way of knowing.

that's a misleading trap and you fell for it. It's really a put up job because reductionism is not proved by experiment. It's a philosophy.In fact experimental thinking is a philosophy. Philosophy is at the heart of everything. science is no more a departure form philosophy than the man in the moon is a man.


SG:

Where did I say that science wasn't philosophy? In fact, I believe that divorcing philosophy from science is dangerous. That's why philosophy ought to change to accept the experimental nature of human understanding.

Meta: You are reducing philosophy too. This is really a validation of my observation that atheists create a fortress of facts mentality. (see fortress of facts part 2). The notion of prgamatism is not the exclusion of idealism or of transcendence. That can't be used to rule out possibilities or to constrain the nature of reality based upon some pre conceived idea. That is nothing more than ideology. Philosophy by taxonomy doesn't work becuase there are too many exceptions. You can't disprove an arguemnt just by linking it to a certain school, and moreover, various thinkers cheat on the categories. Royce is a good example. He believed in God and transcendent reality but wanted to be pragmatic about proving it. Moreover, ruling out transcendent reality on the basis of not providing evidence for it is illogical, since the whole concept of transcendence is that it's beyond our understanding. What sense does it make to expect proof of something that's supposed to be beyond proof? Then to compound the error by asserting dogmatically there are no transcendent realms is just as metaphysical as statement as saying that there are. If we say we can rule out something form existence we are saying we know there is no such thing. That means we are pretending to a form of knowledge we don't have.

Reducing the concept of knowledge only tho those things we can know with certainty and to those things that support our world view is tyrannical. It takes the knowing out of knowledge. It means knowing is not based upon what we know but some what preconceived rubric someone else decides we must know.