Philosophy is nothing but personal ideology/propaganda

Re: Philosophy is nothing but personal ideology/propaganda

nightrider wrote:

philosophy is nothing but ideology or personal propaganda
philosophy is nothing more that a rationalization of a persons psychological dispositions
philosophy is a smoke screen to hide behind and make the psychological disposition more profound
people dont believe an idea because it was presented in a good argument
people believe for psychological reasons then invent the philosophical justification
that is why you can never un- convince anyone
all that Socrates does is threaten their very mind their psychology he does not threaten their philosophy because their philosophy was never about logic and reason in the first place

I tend to agree with your thoughts, since it goes along with the belief that any position can be argued from both pro and con effectively by intelligent people. There can always be an argument for either position on anything.

So, yes, I agree, that a person's philosophical position oftentimes reflects their own personal position.

This realization does take away from smiling at the rest of humanity, since they would therefore be mostly closed minded folks. And, since we form our positions early, based on the brain-washing process called society, we really may have little free will.

It makes me wonder if while my brain is a good computer processor, it is just really working with software that I had no choice to accept or reject, it was done at such a young age.

I applaud your willingness to admit the "King is naked," so to speak (like in the fable the King's New Suit of Clothes).

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Re: Philosophy is nothing but personal ideology/propaganda

nightrider wrote:

philosophy is nothing more that a rationalization of a persons psychological dispositions

Well, that might be a definition ... which is only a bit away from the meaning of the word philosophy/philosophia: "love of wisdom".

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Re: Philosophy is nothing but personal ideology/propaganda

Walter Hinteler wrote:

nightrider wrote:

philosophy is nothing more that a rationalization of a persons psychological dispositions

Well, that might be a definition ... which is only a bit away from the meaning of the word philosophy/philosophia: "love of wisdom".

Most people don't like to admit their gods have clay feet, so to speak.

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Re: Philosophy is nothing but personal ideology/propaganda
nightrider, speak for yourself.

nightrider wrote:

people dont believe an idea because it was presented in a good argument
people believe for psychological reasons then invent the philosophical justification

You're making a generalisation. Some philosophers care very deeply about what is true, and are determined to know only what is true (not merely what they would like to be true). Of course, it is difficult not to be influenced by psychological biases, and many philosophers do nothing more than rationalise their prejudicial opinions. But I would call them bad philosophers. Philosophy itself is, in many cases, a search for the real truth.

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that is why you can never un- convince anyone

That is simply not true. I used to think that the recent UK ban on public smoking was bad for society because it took away one of our freedoms. I debated this with a friend one night, and after many hours he managed to convince me that the ban was a good thing, because it protected our freedom to go to public places without damaging our health from passive smoke. I changed my mind based on my friend's very valid argument.

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I tend to agree with your thoughts, since it goes along with the belief that any position can be argued from both pro and con effectively by intelligent people. There can always be an argument for either position on anything.

There can always be an argument on either side, but that doesn't mean there's no right answer. For example, either there is a God or there isn't one. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. Only one of the following statements is a fact:

1) There is a God.
2) There is not a God.

Intelligent people can argue for either of these, but that doesn't make them both right. We live in a world where some things are true and other things are not true, and philosophy is a way of trying to find out which thigns are which. It is possible to use logic and rationality to objectively work out what things are true and what things aren't. It has been done.

It was once thought that knowledge was nothing more than 'justified, true belief'. But a philosopher called Gettier came up with a counterexample to this; an example of a situation in which one could have a belief which was both justified and true, but which would not be knowledge. So Gettier was able to work out that something was not true. It is possible to have a justified true belief which is not knowledge, therefore it is false that knowledge is nothing more than justified true belief.

Philosophy sometimes gets results... results which tell us what is objectively true.

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Nightrider, I tend to agree with the notion that virtually all we can come up with intellectually are opinions (G.S. Pierce) and interpretations made from deep-seated perspectives (Nietzsche). But I do think that for you this notion occurs as an ideological exaggeration of gross proportions.
I would argue, perhaps with equal vehemence, that most of the fundamental religious theologies are "smoke screens" serving psychological functions.

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Agrote, it seems to me that the truths we construct in our philosophical efforts are not absolutely "objective" in nature. I do not agree with Nightrider that they are absolutely "subjective" either. The scientific method serves to constrain our subjective dispositions, even though it does not do this with absolute success. We cannot be converted into robots or Vulcans. If anyhing I would say our "truths" are combinations of objective" and subjective "facts" (little theories).
Perhaps we can say that the ideals, objective and subective, are poles of spectra on which are distributed ideas varying in degree of externality and internality of source.

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JLNobody wrote:

Agrote, it seems to me that the truths we construct in our philosophical efforts are not absolutely "objective" in nature. I do not agree with Nightrider that they are absolutely "subjective" either. The scientific method serves to constrain our subjective dispositions, even though it does not do this with absolute success. We cannot be converted into robots or Vulcans. If anyhing I would say our "truths" are combinations of objective" and subjective "facts" (little theories).
Perhaps we can say that the ideals, objective and subective, are poles of spectra on which are distributed ideas varying in degree of externality and internality of source.[/quote

I think you could be right about that, although I'm not sure where what you've just said would fall on the objective-subjective scale. I agree that science is not 100% successful in constraining subjectivity. But what about mathematics? You can have actual proofs in mathematics - objective truths that we can be absolutely certain about. E.g. you can prove that 1 + 1 = 2. I suspect that formal logic is capable of the same thing, and can constrain our subjective dispositions fairly successfully.

If there exists a belief which is both true and justified, and which is not knowledge, then it cannot be true that [b]all[/b] justified true beliefs are cases of knowledge. Is that not a purely objective truth?

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Agrote, perhaps the metaphor of a position on a spectrum is inadequate for our purposes. Perhaps some kind of combination, maybe even a dialectic of degrees of objectivity ( regulated by external constraints) and subjectivity (regulated by subjective compulsions) is better. Don't know. I'm not sure what we mean by "knowledge" here.
You ask if a belief that is both true and justified is not "objective truth" (or absolute knowledge? Are you not begging the question with that assertion, i.e., the assumption of truth and justification? As far as I can tell, mathematics provides not much more than tautology: 1+1= 2 seems to me just another way of saying 2. It's not "subjective" in the sense of being private; it is clearly public or shared as a conventional understanding. As such I might call it an inter-subjective kind of cultural "truth."

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Re: Philosophy is nothing but personal ideology/propaganda

agrote wrote:

There can always be an argument on either side, but that doesn't mean there's no right answer. For example, either there is a God or there isn't one. It's not a matter of opinion, it's a matter of fact. Only one of the following statements is a fact:

1) There is a God.
2) There is not a God.

Intelligent people can argue for either of these, but that doesn't make them both right. We live in a world where some things are true and other things are not true, and philosophy is a way of trying to find out which thigns are which. It is possible to use logic and rationality to objectively work out what things are true and what things aren't. It has been done.

I think using God as an example is not good, since no one can prove God exists. So, even without proof he exists, people believe in his existence, because God is just a concept. It's the concept we either believe exists or doesn't exist. God is not a fact; God is a concept. I don't think I'm just playing with words.

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Foofie, I agree. But isn't virtually everything we experience a matter of concept, all our sensations are framed within systems of constructs--otherwise we don't experience them. We live in a constructed (culturally constituted) world; we react to our "cooked" constructions of situations, things and events rather than to "raw" situations, things and events.

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Sorry, in a post above, I meant to say 1+1 is another way of saying 2.

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JLNobody wrote:

You ask if a belief that is both true and justified is not "objective truth" (or absolute knowledge?

No, sorry... I was asking about the entire sentence:

agrote wrote:

If there exists a belief which is both true and justified, and which is not knowledge, then it cannot be true that all justified true beliefs are cases of knowledge.

Taking that whole sentence as one proposition, is it even possible to deny it's objective truth? Does it actually make sense to say that the above is a false proposition?

I suppose you could argue that it's tautological, though. This depends on whether you think that the following are two seperate pieces of information, or just two ways of saying the same thing:

1) Not all X's are Y
2) At least one X is not Y

Foofie wrote:

I think using God as an example is not good, since no one can prove God exists. So, even without proof he exists, people believe in his existence, because God is just a concept. It's the concept we either believe exists or doesn't exist. God is not a fact; God is a concept. I don't think I'm just playing with words.

That's simply not true. The concept of God obviously exists. Atheists believe that it is nothing more than a concept (i.e. that it is not instantiated), whereas theists believe that the concept applies to a genuine thing which really exists. The difference between theism and atheism is ontological (i.e. it is about what actually exists in the external world, not merely in our minds). The difference is not conceptual, because many atheists (if not all) accept that there is a concept of God, and they simply deny that there is any reason to believe that the concept is instantiated in the world... they agree that the word 'God' has a meaning, but they do not believe that there actually is a God.

As an anology, think of unicorns. Presumably you don't believe in unicorns. What that means is that you don't believe that there really are horse-like creatures with single horns growing on their heads, somewhere on Earth at this moment in time. As for the concept of a unicorn, surely you must believe that it exists! The concept is very simple... a horse with a horn. People have drawn unicorns. Clearly wer have a concept of unicorns, and the same goes for God.

If, say, the Christian God exists, then it is a fact that there is a deity who is omniscient, omnipotent etc. Whether we realise that it is a fact is another matter. If God exists, He exists regardless of what we believe.

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I agree that the subjectivity-objectivity dimension involves a false dichotomy and that this general issue gives rise to alternative and fruitful views of epistemology. An aspect of this is non-binary of "fuzzy logic" where the "law of the excluded middle" is rejected in favour of dynamic, functional or contextual aspects of set membership, (on which, as I understand it, some recent technological developments are based.)

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the view that binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" are the arbiters of "philosophical value" is at best naive, and at worst, ignorant.

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fresco wrote:

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the view that binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" are the arbiters of "philosophical value" is at best naive, and at worst, ignorant.

Can you explain?

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JLNobody wrote:

Foofie, I agree. But isn't virtually everything we experience a matter of concept, all our sensations are framed within systems of constructs--otherwise we don't experience them. We live in a constructed (culturally constituted) world; we react to our "cooked" constructions of situations, things and events rather than to "raw" situations, things and events.

Can I can equate "cooked constructions" to barbecue? "Raw situations" can be equated to salads?

I think it's just that people put the proverbial cart before the horse when they philosophize. They want to prove something, so they put that cart first.

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Foofie wrote:

JLNobody wrote:
Foofie, I agree. But isn't virtually everything we experience a matter of concept, all our sensations are framed within systems of constructs--otherwise we don't experience them. We live in a constructed (culturally constituted) world; we react to our "cooked" constructions of situations, things and events rather than to "raw" situations, things and events.

Can I can equate "cooked constructions" to barbecue? "Raw situations" can be equated to salads?

I think it's just that people put the proverbial cart before the horse when they philosophize. They want to prove something, so they put that cart first.

But good philosophers admit defeat... yes they want to prove something, so they try to. But if they can't prove it, they don't pretend to. Good philosophers change their minds.

Everybody has intuitions, and philosophers often use these as the basis for their theories, and then attempts are made to determine whether these intuitions are actually coherent or true.

The reason philophy works is that philosophers listen to each other and influence each other, and form a body of knowledge rather than just a collection of biased opinions. Yes, perhaps many philosophers put the cart before the horse and try to rationalise what they already believe. But if there's a bunch of philosophers providing rationalisations for various different opinions on the same topic, somebody more scientifically-minded (who cares more about what is true than what they might want to be true) can come along and look at these rationalisations, and see which ones contradict themselves and which ones don't.

So as long as there are what I see as 'good philosophers', it doesn't matter if other philosophers are biased and opinionated. As long as their 'rationalisations' are legible, a good philosopher can put his/her own opinions to one side and look at these rationalisations in an objective way.

What do you think about what you've just said about philosophy? Which are you putting first, the cart or the horse?

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agrote, (briefly)

Firstly, following Godels "incompleteness theoerem", all systems involve at least one axiom whose "truth" must be assumed. It follows that "truth" is about "what works" and "elegance" within a particular paradigm rather than some statement about "objective reality". Secondly, since "binary logic" is only one end product of cognitive maturational processes which may be used in semantic analysis, we cannot argue that it is a "necessary" condition for such analysis ("dialectical logic" is another tool often used in "systems theoretic" approaches to biological issues).

Even without these specific "reasons, any "philosopher" of merit would have at least passing knowledge of Kuhn's "structure of scientific revolutions" in which the subtle paradigmatic and social nature of "knowledge" is discussed. With the rise of "probability theory" gone are the days of the Popperian clear cut "falsifiabilty principle", to be partially eclipsed by an analysis of observer-observed relationships with "thinking" and "languaging" as processes thereto.

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Excuse me (or not) for butting in...Fresco/JL, may I ask a question of you?

Is philosophy to you about understanding humans with empathy, or about a clean analysis of how the mind words?

As an extension...do you think that human 'bonding' is a spiritual or mental bonding (or both)?

And, do philosophers find it hard to bond?

I know these are a little of track...the latter two questions sprung into my mind when I was reading a book a short time back (and they are related to the first).

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Quote:

As has been pointed out elsewhere, the view that binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" are the arbiters of "philosophical value" is at best naive, and at worst, ignorant

you refute yourself fresco
you are applying binary logic and simplistic notions of truth yourself in your arguments here and your assessment of the validity of the arguments
your try and avoid contradicting yourself and you would say that any one who contradicts them self cant be true
same goes for any philosopher and his arguments -you would asses a phd thesis useing binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" are the arbiters
ie if it contradicts itself it cant be true

godel used binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" are the arbiters in develeping his theorems
kuhn used binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" are the arbiters in writing his book -and both are judged to be valid by binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" are the arbiters
godel kuhm dean phd thesis kant fodor piaget any philosopher and his arhuments any one on here is judged for validity not by paraconsistent logic not by fuzzy logic not by non-aristotelian logics -2,4 etc valued logics but by useing binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" as the arbiters
if any one is judged to be inconsistent they are are judged to not be talking truth-you have spent myrid posts trying to refute dean by useing binary logic and simplistic concepts of "truth" as the arbiters- and not by some other logic critreria

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Philosophy is nothing but personal ideology/propaganda

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