A_Seagull wrote: ↑December 14th, 2018, 12:01 am
ktz wrote: ↑December 13th, 2018, 9:58 pm
This an assertion is presented without justification. Nevermind that there's an entire body of work on justified true belief as the foundation of epistemology. You didn't present it alongside your assertion so let's just go ahead and dismiss it.
Then we can dismiss your 'blunders' too.
the "Seven Blunders of the World"?
Well, actually we can't justifiably dismiss the blunders on this basis, since we just dismissed the justification based on which the dismissal is based. Since the dismissal of these "blunders" is only justified by an assertion that we just dismissed, your new dismissal is no longer justified. But I imagine that could be a fairly common issue when dealing with someone who invokes the appeal to the stone or appeal to ridicule whenever they encounter an idea they disagree with.
Not to mention that your particular invocation of Hitchens' Razor misses the point he was trying to make in the first place -- the original idea is that "What can be presented without
evidence can be dismissed without
evidence." Hitchens is making the case for the value of empiricism above all other forms of justification -- the original context is from an 2003 Slate article where he is attacking Mother Teresa as a fraud. What he is not trying to do is make a point about the necessity or sufficiency of an immediate presentation of justification, which appears to be the criteria upon which your dismissal is based. And a case can be made in the first place that
Hitchens' Razor is not a well-considered idea in the first place, and highly prone to abuse in the service of smug validation.
Note that even if you weren't referencing Hitchens' Razor, and instead trying to reference the original Latin proverb,
quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur, the translation is closer to "What is asserted gratuitously may be denied gratuitously", which means something closer to admonishing someone who makes an unnecessarily gratuitous statement shouldn't be surprised when they get an unnecessarily gratuitous repudiation. It's a proverb, not a tautology of propositional logic.
Or do you want to try to 'justify' them? See if you can justify them without invoking an element of propaganda, naïve or otherwise.
Sure, I mean I already mentioned a few examples of where you can find the relevant philosophical conversation -- Kant, Aristotle, etc. If you are interested and open to considering the merits of ideas you presently disagree with, then I am happy to explore these topics with you. I won't rule out a productive conversation though it seems apparent that you will probably have to more clearly define what is and isn't naivete or propaganda in your eyes, since I highly doubt we share the same view on that point. Is Aristotle propaganda? Adam Smith? Deontology? Do they only become propaganda when when they support an idea that falls outside of your own subjective worldview, one that I suspect probably adheres only to the Chicago school of economic thought or some variant of objectivism?
However, it looks like Steve is trying to continue a more on-topic discussion here, and I don't want to let my passing reference hijack the whole conversation, so I'll start a new thread in the Ethics and Morality forum.
You may have a heart of gold, but so does a hard-boiled egg.