a really good question. And when I asked to a hardcore erstwhile Lefty “friend” who considers himself moral a few years ago, all I got was nervous chuckling and the avoidant, “Same as you!”
Uh, OK…
I think it is important to ask a simple question over and over and over: “Just how do you know?”
becomes a species of Rationalism:
You know, at some point, Empiricism does indeed devolve into a kind of Rationalism. And the two kind of merge, really. Because at some point there has to be an explanation of what is meant by the numbers. And that meaning is not itself totally empirically derived. It rests on a foundation of logic (Rationalism). So at that point it is indeed a distant conceptual cousin of Rationalism, not pure empiricism at all.
Even so, there really IS a difference in emphasis between the two approaches. While the numbers truly do not meaningfully exist outside of our conceptualization and explanation of them, Rationalism exalts this theoretical explanation above anything else—certainly above the data. The bottom line “reality“ is the conceptualization. The data are just ornaments hung on the tree of this conceptualization. So again, this is a major (and often not understood) difference in emphasis.
Oh yes, there is a difference in style. But neither approach is totally devoid of the other side. It is far more a matter of emphasis. So it is true that the Conservative/Empiricist side makes the facts much more crucial and then uses (Rationalistic) logic along with the observed data in the argument, while the Leftist/Rationalist side mostly ignores or avoids the data (except when it bolsters their argument). Their focus is mainly on the “beauty“ of the idea—the internal “conceptual satisfying-ness” if you will. And for them, explanatory power is NOT the only mouth to be fed! There is Lefty orthodoxy, after all…
For Conservatives/Empiricists, facts are the basic “bricks” of an explanation. For Leftists, facts are merely the decorative mortar that, in 70s fashion, oozes out between the bricks of their pre-conceived notions (like extruded mortar joints).
Of course, these extruded joints are inherently less stable, long-term. Just like Lefty Rationalism…
bereft of meaning. Because if there is no ultimate Truth-Teller (as with saying, “your truth” and “my truth”), there simply IS no right or wrong behavior. Sure, it may be against the rules, but there is no actual good and no actual bad–no right, and no wrong. There are only procedural wrongs, not things that are wrong in se.
ALL is mere preference. One fares according to the management of one’s self; every person prospers according to his or her genius, and every person conquers according to his or her strength. And certainly, whatever a person does has no actual moral valence! Morality actually doesn’t exist!
And neither does Truth. And therefore, Science. There is ONLY desire or preference, and the brute power to satisfy those desires and preferences! ALL claims to knowledge are merely a gambit, standing in the place of what is real–power.
The strong do what they want. The weak do what they must.
THIS is the Gospel of Bill Maher. Kinda desolate, eh? It IS Post-Modernism! It truly IS a banal atheism. It is Nihilism on steroids.
It is purely a reversion to a Nietzschian will-to-power.
You’re a long way from home… Welcome to the Post-Modern Pleasure Dome.
you subscribe to the Relativist (and it’s stylish kid brother, Post-Modernist) ideology, there are some things that you simply can’t (logically) do.
I don’t agree with such epistemology, but I also don’t wig out much about Relativism and/or Post-Modernism. But still, it would sure be nice if proponents of those views were just a little conceptually consistent. Because I would estimate that about 98% of people who claim to be Relativists/Post-Modernists actually are not. They want to have their conceptual cake and eat it, too. Uh, no.
In all relativism, there is no way to truly know anything. And if there simply IS no “solid” right or wrong, on what grounds can anyone object to anything?
And pair it with lack of moral agency as with the various forms of determinism and the concepts of right and wrong make even LESS sense—a person prospers according to his or her own genius and conquers according to his or her her own strength—and NOTHING they do could be construed as a “crime.”
Unless there is some kind of “Truth-Teller,” the language of morality is totally bogus and bereft of ANY logical sense! Indeed, the ONLY way to invoke morality is to postulate some sort of god. Or God. Otherwise it is just Nietzschean preference—a mere display of power.
Anything contrary to this is just mushy-headed defensiveness. Let’s be QUITE clear: To postulate right and wrong IS to postulate a unique God (not Pantheism). If there is right and wrong and you can know things, there logically must be a God. That logic is air-tight!
Indeed, to know ANYTHING is, at heart, an appeal to traditional theism. Because if there is no God and everything is just random crap or a demonstration of a mere will-to-power, then NOTHING can be known, anyway! So no science…
THAT is why Galileo and Newton and such were overt and unapologetic theists. THAT was an integral and logically necessary part of the scientific endeavor itself! That is also why science only evolved in Christian Europe, and not in the more practically advanced China…
Just amazing! And not in a good way, either.
All the paper’s authors agreed to retract, save Lesné, who has been under investigation for manipulating data.
What makes this retraction so significant is that it has driven research into Alzheimer’s treatments for nearly two decades, and treatment approaches based on its conclusions have failed to yield results.
If the hypothesis that amyloid protein buildups cause Alzheimer’s symptoms is wrong, Lesné is responsible for perhaps billions of wasted research dollars and two decades of scientists following a false lead.
And immeasurable human suffering. I mean, is my dad dead because of what she did?
MANY bedrock social psychology studies have recently been shown to be fraudulent–the foundational studies we all learned. Milgram. Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment. More currently, the “scientists” at the CDC and elsewhere who totally fabricated data in order to push a political agenda. And now this. Wow.
Folks, we need reliable data upon which we can base decisions! And to find out that this fraud runs so amazingly deep is more than a bit discouraging. It means that we don’t actually know what we think we know.
It is a crisis of epistemology. And it is head-spinning.
I think we are seeing now how important morality is in Science. Because without morality, there actually is no knowledge.
eventually devolves into a lack of moral agency. An obvious example is the teaching of the so-called New Atheists.
Major figures of New Atheism include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett, collectively referred to as the “four horsemen” of the movement…
But here’s the issue: If all is merely materialistically necessary, then so is my opposition. And so is New Atheism. There IS no Truth Value to either side. In other words, Dawkins and Hitchens (Hitchens died in 2011) admittedly have no truth/meaning argument at all against theism!
No matter what “team” you are on then, it is merely necessary. You are merely a product of your upbringing, education, and cognitive abilities. You no more choose your position than a nail chooses to go into a board after being struck by a hammer!
BUT, on the other hand, if there IS moral agency, the “team” I choose to be on is a reflection of my own morality, of right and wrong, good and bad.
So, it boils down to this: If all is mere reflex, any view I have is by definition truth-deficient and therefore has no meaning at all. And if there IS real moral agency, then there is fundamental meaning to my behavior–there IS “right” and “wrong.”
Atheists need to be a little consistent: If there is no moral agency, then we are just complex hammers, and there is no right or wrong–there is only metaphysical necessity. If I oppose them, that is no more morally meaningful or significant than their pronouncements! It’s ALL just sound and fury, meaning nothing.
Me? I think there is indeed moral agency. And thus there is moral meaning to our thoughts and behaviors.
is in some serious trouble. Once people start honestly fact-checking, there is very likely to be many, if not most, researchers who are in fact guilty of Academic fraud. And THAT scares the crap out of Professors!
So Academia as a whole is scared, and rightly so. Because so dang many of them took a scientific shortcut to fame and fortune. Leaving epistemological squalor in their wake.
And it’s not a new thing. No, not by a long shot. I am a psychologist. And MANY of the seminal, ground-breaking experiments at the very heart of psychology were… faked. I learned about them as a student, and taught them myself as a professor. And they were faked–the Stanford Prison experiment, Milgram’s electric shocks, lots of it. And these were bread-and-butter staples of psych 101!
But suddenly people are (rightly) becoming very skeptical. They are (again, rightly) less impressed by credentials, soi-disant expertise, and “scientific findings,” etc. MANY famous studies just can’t be replicated–and you wonder why. Well, I guess we know why now…
And it’s NOT just psychology–that is just what I personally am most familiar with. Nutrition is another area that is more than a bit sketchy in that way. Even some medical “science” is more wish-fulfillment, hide-bound-ness, fear-mongering, and profit-seeking than fact (see: COVID “vaccines”).
The solution? Honest science. Show your work. Independent replication. Time. True peer review. These things are actually in place, it’s just that they have been bastardized, bowdlerized, and corrupted.
I trust reviewed and replicated science. Humans? Not so much…
But we need to understand that “science” is a process we use to approach truth, not a subject. It is a method.
And there truly are only two (related) ways to scientifically discredit the truth-value of a statement (Sir Karl Popper). The first is to say that it really did not happen. It does not actually exist.
So that is the first principle. Reliability. Does it really happen? Is it reliable that whenever you see X, you also see Y? And so science has many ways of dealing with this reliability issue.
But there is another issue. Is what you saw what you say it was? Is your explanation or theory of the observation valid? Maybe you can reliably produce Y. OK, but does it really mean what you say it does? And THAT is an issue of logic, argument, and persuasion.
See, science is a method that is not (ideally) at all about our strongly-held worldviews. Rather, I need to compare my theory against competing ones. It is therefore impossible to assess the validity of my argument without comparing it against competing arguments. So I better not avoid those competing arguments!
Unfortunately, that is exactly what people on the Left usually do. They most often avoid logical argument like the plague, and do not have real truth-seeking intent. Their assumptions and theories are never put under the strain of logical attack.
And that means Lefties do not have access to scientific truth. They have a religion. Again, I’m not saying there is no way to get truth from religion, but it’s certainly not science.
You can say “Well, that’s just what I believe and my belief is no less “truthy” than anyone else’s!” (Aye, but the rub is that by those lights it isn’t any MORE “truthy,” either). Going down that dark path is a denial of truth altogether. Adrift on a Godless sea, so to speak. That is the basis of post-modernism. There IS no veridical Truth, only opinion.
But Lefties, are you sure you want to go there? Because the hammer that builds Caesar’s house can also take apart Caesar’s house!
OK, so then if that is correct (that there is no Truth, only opinion) why should I believe YOU over a dog-faced baboon or some still stranger creature? (thanks Socrates/Plato)
I mean, if all assertions are rooted in a Nietzschean will-to-power and have nothing to do with Truth (because there is none), your assertions are equally empty of truth-value and a mere ploy for power!
So that Post-Modern approach is not science. It is a species of religion. No one is saying that there is no knowledge to be had in religion, I’m just saying it isn’t science. It’s a different kind of knowledge. It lives mainly in the land of “witnessing” and “testimony” rather than mainly in experiment and logic.
Again, I’m not saying there is no truth there, nor am I saying that science is the only way of getting knowledge. I am merely saying that this is not scientific truth. Science never totally “proves” anything. There is always at least a sliver of possibility that my theory is wrong. When you hear someone who is engaging in epistemological closure (<cough> Fauci <cough>) you know that they have left science behind. A real scientist does not ever say, “the science is settled.” They know that the “tails” ever approach the horizontal axis, but NEVER touch it!
Epistemological Closure: I already know and there cannot be any more knowing! Yeah, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
damage that we are seeing: The death of trust in experts. COVIDIANS can’t tell the Truth any more than a dog-faced baboon or some still stranger creature! (thanks, Socrates–though he seems to have mostly been addressing biological reductionism–still, it attaches here)
And I agree, that current thinking is mainly a result of the university focus on a jaded and cynical Post-Modern know-nothingism (though it is almost totally un-self-conscious). Because if there IS no non-meaningless fact and ALL is a Nietzschean will to power, there is no “Truth,” even in what the “experts” are saying! THAT is Post-Modernism!
Yes, the legacy of COVID is Nietzschean. Or Nihilistic, actually.
It’s not the death of God that we are facing (as Nietzsche famously argued), it is the death of trust in experts. For many, the belief in God is very much alive! But belief in experts? Eh, it has taken a bit of a hit, lately…
(pantheism) is kind of trendy right now, but I think it is pretty much intellectually bankrupt.
Pantheism appears to me to be just warmed-over atheism. In pantheism, god is… everything. In everything and through everything. There is no personal god. No “God with us,” as the Bible says. It is a totally impersonal “The Force,” which is no surprise since George Lucas is… a Buddhist.
But it seems be just atheism/materialism with a “The Force” cherry on top. That cherry is in no way integral to the structure of the ideology itself—it is just garnish. The structure is the same with or without the “cherry.” So it suffers from all the same logical and evidentiary weaknesses of atheism.