Well do you agree that there is always some level of uncertainty concerning the target of criticism?
And do you agree that there is some degree of negative value in failing to criticize those who deserve it?
Applying this argument to the situation at hand, I could point out that I assume based on my general observations that low-level jobs in fast food restaurants are easy to come by for any young person who speaks English reasonably well. Therefore I know that the girl in the video could easily switch jobs. By your reasoning, this is not an assumption – it is actual knowledge which happens to be based on assumptions.
Any level of uncertainty compatible with knowledge, yes.
I don’t agree with that.
I don’t know that about a random person working at a fast food chain, and I don’t believe you do either of course. (This may be moot since, to my understanding, CfA pays better and offers better working conditions than most other fast food chains.)
Fine, I maintain that there is negative value in remaining silent instead of criticizing those who serve wrongdoers.
I further maintain that this is a matter of opinion.
Do you agree that it’s a matter of opinion? If not, please demonstrate that there is no negative value in remaining silent instead of criticizing those who serve wrongdoers.
So what? By your reasoning, it is actual knowledge which is merely based on reasonable assumptions.
As I’ve said, opinions can be claims, and claims are amenable to rational argument. So I grant that it’s a matter of opinion, and also insist that it’s either true or false. As above, I can’t “demonstrate” anything about a topic like this on an internet message forum in five minutes. I can gesture at an argument, though.
First, a clarification. I don’t claim there’s never negative value in failing to offer deserved criticism. (I can see how what I wrote could be read that way.) Rather, I claim that there’s not always negative value in failing to offer deserved criticism.
The argument I gesture at is this: Sometimes offering the criticism will only make things worse. One example would be a case in which criticism would encourage a stubborn clinging to the criticized course of action. In that case, failing to offer deserved criticism may have positive value instead of negative value.
Since I don’t think you have the level of justification in your beliefs about the girl at CfA to license moral criticism, I of course would not agree to your claim here to have “actual knowledge” of the relevant factors.
So your position is that each and every opinion is either true or false?
For example, what is the correct amount of money to bet for a 50% chance of winning $500,000 dollars?
So the value of criticism (or failure to be criticized) is to be judged solely on utilitarian grounds? If so, please prove that this assertion is true. If not, what are the correct criteria for judging the value of criticism and please demonstrate that they are the correct grounds.
Also, do you agree that there is usually a good deal of uncertainty in the practical effect of any piece of criticism?
Why not? It’s a logical conclusion based on reasonable assumptions.
More importantly, what piece of “actual knowledge” (outside of your mind) doesn’t qualify as a logical conclusion based on reasonable assumptions (or is itself a reasonable assumption).
Also, why draw a distinction between conclusions based on reasonable assumptions and reasonable assumptions per se?
Sorry, I was trying to be careful in my use of words like “can be”. I don’t say that every opinion is a claim. I say that opinions can be claims. Hence, not every opinion is true or false–but some are. If I am of the opinion that the sky is brown, (say, because the guy in the next office told me so and I’ve never known him to play jokes or have strange perceptions,) my opinion is false.
Any opinion of the form “X is always the correct amount of money to bet for a %0% chance of winning $500,000 dollars” is a false opinion.
Of course, you will always be able to ask questions of this form, and of course, I will always be able to provide rational considerations in response, until we get to fundamental assumptions. I do not see what bearing these fact have on the question of whether opinions can be true or false. A thing’s being true or false is independent of the basis upon which it is accepted or rejected. If I believe the sky is blue only because a prophet of my religion claims it to be so, then I have a radically irrational basis for thinking the sky is blue–but my belief is nevertheless true.
I’m not sure, but I believe it’s irrelevant either way. Even if there is usually a good deal of uncertainty about the practical effect of a piece of criticism, this does not change the fact that in some cases, refraining from deserved criticism may have positive value. Even if it is difficult to know when this is the case about any particular situation, it does not change the fact that it can be true of that particular situation.
I do not know how reasonable you mean “reasonable” to be here. I would not offer moral criticism of a person unless I believed myself to be more than what I would call merely “reasonably certain” about their situation. Perhaps “knowledge” isn’t the standard for moral criticism, but something stricter–not only knowing but knowing that one knows.
In any case, my level of certainty is only part of the picture. Legitimate criticism requires knowledge, and knowledge isn’t just justification in one’s beliefs, but also consists in one’s beliefs being true. No matter how certain I am about someone, if I criticize them morally but it turns out my beliefs about their situation are false, then my criticism was illegitimate. I owe them an apology. Hence, I want to be extra careful in making sure I “know that I know” what is going on with them before I criticize. (Or, barring that, hedge my criticism with acknowledgment of my lack of epistemological rigor. I actually would have no problem, for example, with a guy like someone in the OP’s video who said “I don’t know your situation in particular, but from where I’m standing, it seems to me you’re doing something wrong. It’s hard for me to imagine how you could be justified.” That works, in my opinion.)
Because they’re two different things, as I defined them in a previous post. They function differently. They are amenable to different types of criticism. For example, conclusions can be criticized (among other things) when they don’t follow from their associated assumptions. (They can be criticized on that ground even if they are true.) But assumptions, since they don’t follow from anything, can only be criticized according to whether they are true or false.
Nope. Still looks like fruitcakery to me. You still haven’t made anything resembling a rational argument at all. I’m still going to classify you as a fruitcake. Sorry.
Well how do I know if something is a “claim” or not?
If I assert that Action X is inappropriate, why is that a “claim”?
So somebody who asserts that generally speaking, it’s inappropriate to gamble, is flat out wrong?
I believe we are already there. Deciding whether a particular course of conduct is inappropriate or not requires criteria and standards for determining appropriateness. Do you agree that there is not one correct set of criteria and standards?
But you are making a general claim – that one should not engage in criticism without “knowledge.” And you further claim that your statement is a “claim,” i.e. that anyone who has a lower standard for criticism is wrong. Therefore you are making a claim about the value in failure to criticize in general – not just in some situations.
So I must insist you provide proof that the negative value in failing to offer deserved criticism is sufficiently low that generally speaking, one should not criticize without “knowledge.”
Agree, but that’s a different question from whether criticism is appropriate.
Anyway, please give me an example of a piece of “actual knowledge” (outside of your mind) doesn’t qualify as a logical conclusion based on reasonable assumptions (or is itself a reasonable assumption).
For purposes of this discussion, I don’t see why this distinction matters. Conclusions would seem to be no more certain than the assumptions which underlie them. Agreed?
Also please give me an example of a piece of “actual knowledge” (outside of your mind) doesn’t qualify as a logical conclusion based on reasonable assumptions (or is itself a reasonable assumption).
Heh. I will amend what I said. Any claim of the form “X is always the right amount to bet for a 50% chance at $500,000 for anyone who must bet” is false.
I tend to think there is a single correct set of criteria and standards, though it is a very complicated one which no one knows in detail, but which every psychologically normal human being knows in more or less broad outline. It is complicated because it takes particular details of people’s situations into account.
I’m not going to provide proof. It is not necessary for something to be proven in order for it to be true. I have, however, provided rational considerations for the view, thereby illustrating the way in which it is amenable to rational dispute.
Possibly a verbal dispute, but I can’t agree with this. A criticism based on incorrect beliefs about the situation is inappropriate, in my view.
If we interpret “logical” broadly to include strong induction as well as deduction, I’d say all knowledge is either a reasonable assumption or a logical conclusion based on reasonable assumptions. (How reasonable “reasonable” has to be is open to question. In fact it’s open to question whether there’s a single reasonableness standard, or whether the standard varies with some other variable.) So I don’t have an example for you. Tracing back through the conversation, I am unsure why you think I need to provide one. Are you sure you don’t mean to ask, instead, for an example of a logical conclusion based on reasonable assumptions that is not knowledge?
In any case, remember that I’ve lately suggested that moral criticism requires a standard even stricter than mere knowledge.
What exactly do you mean by “rational dispute”? And again, how do I know if something is a “claim”?
I’m not sure I understand your point. True or false: “Generally speaking, it is inappropriate to gamble.”
Sure, but if you simply assert that your position is correct but you will not demonstrate it to be true, it’s kind of pointless to discuss it.
For example:
The very best color is teal. Anyone who asserts that red is the best color is flat out wrong. Anyone who disputes that teal is the best color is wrong. This is all true based on a complicated but universal set of criteria. Everyone knows them, but I’m not going to describe them or offer any evidence for their correctness.
Seems to me that you could do the same thing for just about any opinion:
For example: The very best food in the world is avocado. Anyone who disputes this is wrong. Avocado has a lot of vitamin B; can be grown in every continent; is found in a lot of dishes; and is rated as “tasty” by 75% of those surveyed, at least in Western countries.
So you judge the appropriateness of somebody’s conduct not based on what they reasonably believed at the time but based on what later turns out to be the case?
“It was totally inappropriate for the police to shoot that unarmed man. True, he pointed a gun at them, but it was actually a non-firing replica.”
I asserted that “in a strict sense, all knowledge is just reasonable assumptions.”
You claimed that my assertion was “definitely false.”
It’s become clear that you were simply nitpicking. If I were to assert that “Strictly speaking, ‘Socrates is mortal’ is merely a reasonable assumption,” reasonable people would understand what I mean and agree. Only an aggressive nitpicker would say that the sentence is “definitely false” because ‘Socrates is mortal’ is actually a conclusion based on other assumptions. Especially if the issue on the table is uncertainty.
These are difficult questions. The answer to the first relies on an account of the nature of rationality–for which there is no universally agreed upon definition (yet!). To answer the second question with something other than a trivial (and I believe false) equivalence between a “claim” and a “declarative statement” requires an account of propositional meaning–again, a topic over which there is no universal agreement. (Far from it! And again, I say–“yet!”)
Both are active areas of research in Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Linguistics.
So I cannot claim to answer these questions with any authority or confidence. Nevertheless, as I am wont to do for fun and curiosity, I’ll give them a shot. After all, I made the claims, and so I rightly invite the challenge to justify them. (Practical considerations can often obviate the force of the challenge to justify one’s claims–without making the challenge in any way illegitimate–but no such practical considerations apply to this conversation. Yet!)
So: What is a rational dispute? I think it’s a conversation in which
A. Some conversent(s) affirms a declarative sentence
B. Another conversant or other conversants deny the same declarative sentence
C. There is a single proposition which all conversants mean to express by means of that declarative sentence
D. Each conversant is expressing other propositions which all conversants agree, prima facie, seem to make the declarative sentence which they disagree about either seem more likely to be true or seem less likely to be true.
You didn’t ask, but I should add, for a reason that will become clear shortly, that a declarative sentence is “amenable” to rational dispute in a particular linguistic context when, in that context, a token of that declarative sentence expresses a proposition for which there exist facts that make that proposition, in that context, either more likely to be true or less likely to be true.
To your second question: A declarative sentence is a claim when it is amenable to rational dispute, as defined above.
That is a false claim.
Not true. “Demonstration” means absolutely conclusive proof. Absolutely conclusive proofs are almost never necessary to justify claims. But lest I be accused of nitpicking, I’ll register here that I genuinely believed that’s what you meant (because that’s what “demonstration” means) but I’m open to the possibility that you meant somethiing else, and I’m happy to discuss the matter in terms of whatever you did mean.
You’re right that it’s clear it’s probably no use talking to the person above. But it is not a valid parody of anything I’ve said, since I have gone through considerable lengths to explain and support the views I’ve expressed in this conversation.
This person has made it clear that they have an objectively measurable standard for “best food,” and so they are indeed making a claim and it is indeed amenable to rational dispute. For example, if I were able to show that he was mistaken about the vitamin B content, could only be grown in Norway, is found in few dishes, and is disliked by most people, then he would presumably feel obligated to retract his claim. Now–if I showed all that and he didn’t feel obligated to retract his claim, this wouldn’t show that he hadn’t been making a claim amenable to rational dispute. Rather, it would show that despite the fact that he made a claim, he is not actually prepared to follow through on the implications of that fact.
There are two different things to judge.
I think two different senses of “appropriate” have been conflated. One sense I would term as “legitimacy.” The other I’d term as appropriateness properly speaking.
Legitimacy relies on what is actually the case. Appropriateness (properly speaking) relies on what they reasonably* believe.
Roughly speaking, moral criticism is appropriate when making the criticism doesn’t make you a jerk. It’s legitimate when it actually hits its mark–when the criticism is correct, basically.
*Again, I think “reasonable” connotes a lower standard than should apply in cases of moral criticism.
It is hard for me to understand how it could be “nitpicking” to draw attention to the well-established, well-founded distinction between conclusions and assumptions. You said knowledge is “just reasonable assumptions” and that is simply, plainly, non-nitpickingly false.
What you said above, by the way, explains why you would ask for examples of knowledge which are not just reasonable assumptions. But what you actually asked for is examples of knowledge which are neither reasonable assumptions nor conclusions drawn from reasonable assumptions.
Anyway, perhaps you didn’t mean by “just reasonable assumptions” what I (reasonably!) assumed you meant. Pursuant to that, I’ll make myself clear as follows.
I would affirm the following, and maybe it’s what you meant: Anything one knows, one can reasonably assume for the purpose of further inferences.
I would not affirm the following, which is what what you said means: Anything one knows, one has merely reasonably assumed independent of any inferential justification.
“Socrates is mortal” can be reasonably assumed for the purpose of further inferences. But is not something one has merely reasonably assumed independent of any inferential justification.
“Your circumlocutory powers have proven an impressive match against my tortured hypotheticals, Navelgazer… but now you will feel the wrath of my EXCLUDED MIDDLE DICHOTOMIZER RAY! Ha-HA! YES OR NO! YES OR NO!”
I have a question. Why Chick-fil-A? Sure that idiot worked against gay marriage. So does the entire fucking Republican party. Thus every major donor to the GOP is just as deserving of a boycott as that poor deluded chicken pedlar.
Hell, I point to you Fedex and UPS which have donated millions to the GOP, and they are trying (and mostly succeeding) to kill the USPS as their motive. The chicken dude only wants to sell you some nuggets. But donations by Fedex and UPS to the GOP work against gay marriage even more effectively than that idiot.
I guess that, for some people, it’s a matter of how the policies are expressed.
Chick-Fil-A’s main focus in the political arena seems to be opposition to gay marriage. Rightly or wrongly, this is an issue that animates a lot of people, and it does so partly because it is, in many ways, such a no-brainer. No-one loses in any tangible way if gay marriage becomes legal. Straight people don’t suddenly become “less married,” straight marriage is not (whatever the dishonest bigots would have you believe) somehow devalued by gay marriage.
This is not tax policy or healthcare policy or foreign relations, where reasonable people can disagree over the fundamental principles or over the logistics of implementation, and where choosing one system or another has large, tangible consequences for the whole of society. This is an area where the opponents have nothing to lose except a sense of moral superiority, and where there is basically no cost, even to those who are not involved.
Also, while the Republican Party as an institution is working against gay marriage, it is increasingly clear that gay marriage is far, far down the list of issues for many Republican voters and Republican supporters. There are millions of people in America who will most likely vote Republican over issues like tax policy, healthcare, and foreign policy, and who couldn’t give a crap if two guys or two women want to get married. Almost everyone in the libertarian-leaning wing of Republican politics don’t care about gay marriage. The main reason it continues to seem such a big deal is that the traditionalist, fundamentalist conservatives have hijacked much of the rhetoric, and keep pressure on Republicans who otherwise wouldn’t take issue with gay marriage.
As someone who supports gay marriage, i’m actually not especially concerned by Chick-Fil-A’s bigoted stand. The reason is that it has become very clear over the past few years that gay marriage is on the way to mainstream acceptance, that the main impediment to gay marriage is bigoted old people who will die pretty soon anyway, and that folks like the head of Chik-Fil-A are the last gasp of a discredited and dying ideology. I’d prefer for the end to come quickly, but even if it doesn’t, i can live with the fact that it’s pretty much inevitable.
The answer is right there in your question. It’s far easier to boycott a company that does not provide (what people consider to be) a necessary service. You can get fried chicken in a whole bunch of places; you can cook it yourself at home; and even if you can’t, you can actually get by without fried chicken.
If you buy stuff online, it’s often the case that you have no choice about who delivers your products. Personally, in cases where i have a choice, and where i’m not in a hurry for the product, i generally do choose the USPS if it’s an option. Not because i want to boycott the other two, but because i like supporting the post office.
As for using Fedex and UPS myself, to send stuff, i literally can’t remember the last time i did that. If i send something, it’s always by USPS. The big delivery companies get most of their business from other companies (Amazon, etc., etc., etc.).
Also, i take issue with your last sentence in the second-to-last paragraph. The Republicans might oppose gay marriage, but (especially in this economy) far more of their actual resources go to fighting on other fronts.
The reason is partly because no reason–because there was nothing competing for liberal attention in the news that day and it just happened, and the fact that people aren’t individually targeting every knuckledragging sister-raper who opposes gay rights doesn’t discredit the campaigns they do run.
The other reason is the specific facts of the case, which Christians are unable to acknowledge, just dismissing them with “you’re insane” even when linked to mainstream news sources and so forth. It’s not just the mongoloid CEO donating his own money to an evil cause, it’s the company as a whole donating corporate money. And it’s not just anti-marriage–his quote was that we’re ““inviting God’s judgment on our nation.” He’s all but literally using the Fred Phelpsian self-defense argument: start burning all the gays now, before God smites you for not doing it. It’s a call to every form of bigotry, oppression, and violence, shrouded in a veneer of plausible deniability so thin that it resembles a Chick-Fil-A french fry wrapper made transparent with grease. That’s the reason for it being Chick-Fil-A.
Until election day, when robocalls about Obama making everyone get gay-married will win Florida for Romney just like they did Ohio for Bush in 2004. This is, in fact, the only issue that motivates the crucial deciding vote to go to the polls.
Check out Polyanna over here. Over the last few years we’ve had one failed vote after another, constitutional amendments passed, every roadblock put up to make sure that gay rights will never happen without a civil war. And the liberals are abandoning the cause in droves–the line is increasingly “you faggots need to shut up and stop driving the nice black church folk out of the Obama re-election bid.” The average straight “tolerant” person can’t get over his self-satisfaction at not murdering homosexuals; he’s never going to examine his repeated refusal to aid the cause of equality. At this point it looks like rights for sexual minorities have gone about as far as they are going to without a major tactical shift, and no amount of Whiggish “history has a conscious direction towards the good” mystical thinking is going to change the facts.
Now i know why you sound so stupid in these threads: it’s because you apparently don’t actually know what the fuck you’re talking about.
Yes, there have been some setbacks over the past few years, like Amendment 1 in North Carolina, and some court decisions, but there has also been considerable advancement on a number of fronts. To characterize this recent period as nothing but an unending string of losses and failures is retarded and ignorant at best, and at worst is actively and perniciously dishonest.
Prop 8 was overturned in California, and if a similar proposition came up on the ballot again polls suggest that it would fail this time around.
The New Jersey legislature voted to legalized gay marriage, with a significant majority in both houses, and was only thwarted by jerkoff Governor Christie’s veto.
Washington state legalized SSM, as did Washington, D.C.
The sitting President of the United States, the same one you keep making race-baiting arguments about, declared his support for same-sex marriage during a fucking election year!
There have been a bunch of other gains, too, but you’re probably not interested in hearing about those either.
Yes, there’s quite a way yet to go. Yes, there could be setbacks. Some states, for example, have referendums on the ballot this coming November, and it’s possible that some or all of those states will overturn the legalization of SSM. If they do, it will be a shitty day, and i’ll be as angry with those bigots as i was with the bigots here in California who supported Prop 8.
I never asserted that “history has a conscious direction towards the good.” I asserted, based on my reading of specific changes in attitudes towards SSM in the United States, and on my knowledge of recent historical developments, that this particular issue has recently achieved and is achieving greater and greater support in the United States. Furthermore, while predicting the future is always fraught with considerable peril, i believe that the particular array of social, cultural, political, demographic, and economic forces currently at work in America will result in continued advancement for the foreseeable future.
There may be setbacks, and even if there aren’t, advancement will not be as quick as it should be. We should already be at the stage where same-sex marriage is legal in every state and nationally, and the fact that we’re not at that stage speaks to the power that bigots still wield in America. Nor do i believe that activists for gay rights should stop calling for equality in order to mollify Democrats nervous about election results. But i think that you dramatically over-estimate the number of liberals who are doing that.
I also think that you’re making the perfect the enemy of the good, and making an enemy out of people who support your cause. It seems like what you want is to alienate people who support gay rights, so that when they tell you what an idiot you are you can then point to them as examples of bigoted liberalism. But your stupidity hasn’t lessened my commitment to gay rights; it has simply reminded me that, when we fight for equality, sometimes that equality benefits jackasses and morons as well as decent people.
So you’re not one of those Young Democrat robots who values Obama’s re-election over doing the right thing…but you made sure to point out that anyone who disagrees with Obama, or disagrees with someone who supports Obama, is a racist. OK then.
I can’t even vote, so my own political preferences don’t really matter, but in the spirit of the occasion i’ll reply as if i were an American citizen:
A) No, i’m not a “Young Democrat robot,” and i’ve been disappointed with Obama on a number of issues, many of which don’t even have anything to do with SSM. I don’t value his re-election over “doing the right thing”; i value his re-election over the possible alternatives.
B) I didn’t call you a racist, and i didn’t say that disagreeing with someone who supports Obama is racist. I described some of your arguments as “race-baiting,” which is what it seems like when you say things like “you faggots need to shut up and stop driving the nice black church folk out of the Obama re-election bid.”
Just out of interest, which pro-SSM candidate did you vote for in your political party’s primaries? Which pro-SSM candidate are you going to vote for in the Presidential election? Mitt Romney?
