The Skeptic Dialogues part 4: Interruptus

Master Pretense: Perhaps we should take a brief diversionary stroll into confusing context?

Grasshopper: Does this get us back to the village atheist?

Master Pretense: According to the Zen text, The Gateless Gate, “Shogen asked: `Why does the enlightened man not stand on his feet and explain himself?’ And he also said: `It is not necessary for speech to come from the tongue.’ “

Grasshopper: What does that have to do with anything?

Master Pretense shrugs.

Grasshopper: Ugh

Master Pretense: We often get frustrated studying people like Pyrrho because they seem to confirm to our stereotypes of French post-existentialist intellectuals talking about the how “otherness of fluid motion proves the sexism of science” or the pot head talking about “how do I know anything is real?”

In Simon Blackburn’s book Truth: A Guide (Oxford, 2005, p xiii), he gets to sort of pulling tensions in philosophy:

There are real standards. We must fight soggy nihilism, scepticism and cynicism. We must not believe that anything goes. We must not believe that all opinion is ideology, that reason is only power, that there is no truth to prevail. Without defenses against postmodern irony and cynicism, multiculturalism and relativism, we will all to go hell in a handbasket.

So thunders the conservative half of us–of each of us. But perhaps the thunder and conviction betray an anxiety. We may fear that there is another side to it, that our confidence is dogma, that our bluff may be called. There are people who are not impressed by our conviction, or by our pride or our stately deportment. They hear only attempts to impose just one opinion. They hear nothing but the machinations of power and attempts at suppression of alternatives. They hear bluster, the usual disguise for insecurity . . . .

The sides in this conflict have various names: absolutists versus relativists, traditionalists versus postmodernists, realists versus idealists, objectivists versus subjectivists, rationalists versus contextualists, Platonists versus pragmatists. These do not all mean the same, and some people who stand on one side or the other would be choosy about allowing them to apply to themselves. So for the moment they simply act as pointers.

Pyrrho and the methodological skeptic would appear to be on different sides of that hypothetical divide set-up by Blackburn. But is this fair? For one thing, methodological skeptics often don’t actually share a common philosophical framework. Some of probablists and pragmatists who love science and believe that gives us the most probable answer.

But the love of science, and the methods of science, were an attempt to bridge the divide between empiricists and rationalists, Platonism and pragmatism. The controls, the experiments, the falsifiable hypotheses, the distrust of social hierarchy. All of this was an answer to the gap here.

We can see that there is something to both of those impulses–the want to say all ideas are ideology, or that if there isn’t that is true in an opinion, then there is no criteria for judgment. Science doesn’t answer all those questions either. The methodology is about how and what, not so much about meaning and why.

Blackburn makes the further point:

For first, the conflict is not only between different people, but grumbles within the breast of each individual, as we find ourselves pulling us to one side or the other. And second, the conflict is about the our conceptions of ourselves and the our world . . . Today, the stakes in this war are enormous. Relativism in the ancient world typically issues in scepticism, whose main result was the suspension in judgment. . . Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as green light to believe what they like with as much force and much conviction as they like.(xiv)

Grasshopper: So the ancient philosophical skeptic and the relativists may make the same arguments, but they doing so for VERY different reasons.

Master Pretense: Yes.

Grasshopper: And the methodological skeptics still see themselves as fighting the dogmatists, who ironically are using arguments that ancient skeptics used against the dogmatists in the past.

Master Pretense: Yes.

Grasshopper: And most people, including most methodological skeptics, are not philosophically consistent. So we have people fighting skepticism with skepticism and dogma with dogma.

Master Pretense: It appears so.

Grasshopper: But the absolutists, the believers in objective truth, are they right?

Master Pretense: Only an absolutist can answer that.

Grasshopper: Cop-out.

Master Pretense: I’ll let Blackburn talk again.

[Willaim] James describes the absolutists as having a religious temperament, whether the object of his religion is some traditional text or deity, or a new one, such as The Market, or Democracy, or Science. This may also seem surprising, since religious lives can be full of doubts and worry and dark nights of the soul, and as we have already seen, in the modern world, it is the relativists as much as the absolutists who belong to cults. But James may be right to see absolutists as suffering from something very like a religious ambition . . . He [the absolutist] wants communion with higher authority, a provider of guarantees that, acting and thinking as he does, he is at the same time acting and thinking rightly. (xvii)

So the absolutist can end up just confirming his own biases. And the problems with modern skepticism is that both methodological skeptics and the people they oppose to flip and flop between relativism and absolutism depending on the context and the question.

Grasshopper: I have a question?

Master Pretense: Yes?

Grasshopper: Why do you spell “skeptic” with a k and Blackburn spell it with a “c”? And why does English have a “c” at all since its sounds are already covered by K and S.

Master Pretense: One the first question, Blackburn is English and they like C. On the second question, I’ll resort to historical reasoning for this: blame the French.

Grasshopper: Really? Are they why that “I” before “e” rule applies less than it does.

Master Pretense: Probably. I don’t really have any idea.

Grasshopper: So back to the Greeks then.

Master Pretense: Back to the Greeks.

To be continued.

File under What?

There are many things I don’t really understand about Europe, particularly countries that I am ethnically tied too. Take Ireland for example. It appears that have a non-religion specific blasphemy law that is sort of like an American hate speech law that fines anyone who says anything that could religiously offend anybody. Here’s the text of the law thanks to Paliban:

36. Publication or utterance of blasphemous matter.
(1) A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding €100,000. [Amended to €25,000]
(2) For the purposes of this section, a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.
(3) It shall be a defence to proceedings for an offence under this section for the defendant to prove that a reasonable person would find genuine literary, artistic, political, scientific, or academic value in the matter to which the offence relates.
37. Seizure of copies of blasphemous statements.
(1) Where a person is convicted of an offence under section 36, the court may issue a warrant (a) authorising any member of the Garda Siochana to enter (if necessary by the use of reasonable force) at all reasonable times any premises (including a dwelling) at which he or she has reasonable grounds for believing that copies of the statement to which the offence related are to be found, and to search those premises and seize and remove all copies of the statement found therein, (b) directing the seizure and removal by any member of the Garda Siochana of all copies of the statement to which the offence related that are in the possession of any person, © specifying the manner in which copies so seized and removed shall be detained and stored by the Garda Siochana.
(2) A member of the Garda Siochana may (a) enter and search any premises, (b) seize, remove and detain any copy of a statement to which an offence under section 36 relates found therein or in the possession of any person, in accordance with a warrant under subsection (1).
(3) Upon final judgment being given in proceedings for an offence under section 36, anything seized and removed under subsection (2) shall be disposed of in accordance with such directions as the court may give upon an application by a member of the Garda Siochana in that behalf.

By my standards, this is a sort of a libel law nightmare. The proof on what is meant by “intending to cause moral outrage” is vague and will have to be decided by case law, but it seems to me that you could very well prosecute standards of religious faith understand this sort of law when two religions conflict.

This is why I opposed the similar language that was moved to be put into the “human rights” language at the UN. (I am somewhat skeptical of human rights as a means of protecting of people’s persons and dignity, but I’ve gone into that before an won’t today.)