Comprehension being key (in) here…
…but not all being able to unlock it, to be able to follow the narrative.
And this one, naively put , is definitely on me, because I don’t assume to doubt that of anyone but me who can not follow a tolerably reasonable narrative.
It’s doubtful anyone appraises tolerance on basis of apparent unresolved situations, primarily for expressing impressions of ‘pure’ subjectivity.
Apologies for the multiple replies, I also meant to respond to this:
It seems like an arbitrary claim is more likely to be incorrect than correct, would you agree? In that case, wouldn’t doubting as a default be better supported than believing as a default?
One response is that the set of correct claims and the set of incorrect claims are both infinite. I’m not sure the former is true (may depend on whether the universe is quantized rather than continuous), but even if it is, for every correct claim there must be an infinity of incorrect variations. For example, if the claim, “the temperature at (x,y,z,t) is 123K” is correct, then for any n≠0, the claim “the temperature at (x,y,z,t) is 123K±n” is incorrect (and while correct claims would be constrained by the universe being quantized, incorrect claims can be continuous not matter what – they are, after all, incorrect).
A stronger response is that the claims that people are likely to be making are about equally likely to be true or false. My best rebuttal to this argument is that all our claims are false, it’s just a matter of degree, and we can always make progress towards truth by doubting a claim and finding out specifically how it is not-quite-right.
Yes it is stronger, but not what is sought after as the only conceivable one, that must be made in a set of sets, that an equally conceivable last programmer could possibly make, where , among a necessary limitless conceivable universe that simply must be held a virtual limit.
That is the only concept that can keep faith alive, without that? The strongest will fail to fail to develop a default position.
It’s like the argument about the the end of the planet where people feared to go less they fall off, , even if the fail yet to see that that very edge does not really exist, The religious saw this argument from a sense of doubting that anyone would dare to attempt to reach that end.
But we reached that point where from the only default could mean a faulty construction in the first place, and that primacy has been increasingly repressed to the point of an absolute negation , toward absolute randomness.
This bring asunder the very fragility of the use of remaining on the level where there, at the very bottom of the chaotic, the final battle between which to choose can remain, which is which to choose, the real or the virtual of a revised recollection of sets be the fault whereby certainty can be reestablished.
The pyramid has to invert and can not be reinvented from bottom to top, for the same reasons, that the fear was overwhelming about the edge of reaching the planet, how can everything we know about whose fault it is that we have come to This Point?
“ [quote=“Carleas, post:23, topic:80059”]
My best rebuttal to this argument is that all our claims are false, it’s just a matter of degree, and we can always make progress towards truth by doubting a claim and finding out specifically how it is not-quite-right.
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Yes but more and more people are worrying about time running out and distancing themselves from certainty , wether the negative assumptions growing by leaps and bounds will allow virtual access across the board to make changes by degrees affective, that fear is the cause of the content and the meaning of fearing the very fear of reaching that for a better description a ‘limitless limit’ The progress made appears hypothetically to gain more time, but it is the very acceleration of the movement toward the limit that appears to dampen the enthusiasm of really ever seeing the edge.
I agree with Hum (despite my reprehensible trolling) that believing implies doubting at least one alternative conclusion, and doubting implies believing at least one alternative conclusion. I also agree with your use of the word “correct“ in your post.
Falseness is a privation of truth/being (correctness), as evil/badness is a privation of good, and vanity is a privation of nobility.
The default position should be aimed in the direction of increasing authentic goodness. Following the evidence where it leads means adding to it.
Problem?
How is X more or less arbitrary based on whether someone claims to believe X or doubt X?
I’m not talking about weirdo abstract maths and dumb infinite sets Godel nonsense. That isn’t philosophy, it’s barely even math. I am talking about the real world, you know this thing called reality. That (some of us) live in.
Any claim to believe something or doubt something is a specific claim with a specific object. The object is that which is either being believed or doubted (so the claim goes, anyway… many of the things people claim to believe or doubt they really don’t, but that’s a separate issue).
“The claims people are likely to be making are about equally likely to be true or false”, huh? What? What claims? A claim is a specific thing, so let me know which one(s) you mean. Only then can we begin to assess whether they are more or less likely to be true or not. All this over-generalization abstraction stuff is not helpful. I am talking about real things, real claims. Every instance of belief in X or doubt in X is a real thing, not some abstract pile of hypothetical and totally undefined turtles stacked to ‘infinity’.
And given that every such instance is a real (concrete, specific, delineated) thing it has its own space of meaning and must be individually evaluated to determine any likelihood of it being true or not. That is the entire point. Belief for its own sake is just as silly retarded as is doubt for its own sake. You have to orient yourself to the object of the claim, “X”, whatever that is, somehow. To do that you already have reasons on one side or the other. To say no such reasons exist at all would be to invalidate your even being able to formulate the claim, let alone have any coherent, meaningful concept of X itself. Unless you think there is some X out there, some topic or claim, which is so far-removed from every possible encounter with anything we could ever and have ever experienced in real life or in our deriving speculative thinking that it would be impossible to come up with ANY reasons for or against believing in that X. But yeah, that’s absurd, no such X’s even exist, which can be understood immediately by pure logic if one merely glaces at the relevant conceptual space and linkages here. Or feel free to find such an X for which not even one reason can be stacked upon the scales of “belief vs doubt”.
This is an hypothetical demonstration that begs the very questions which support each other , to form , a good analogy relating to finding enough space that can come to a general agreement as to a consistent idea wether all differing evaluations within their own space can meet the criteria sought l to be determined.
The truth / falsity based on inadequate and indeterminate spacial qualifications can not form cohesive agreement necessary to form a general rule applicable equally to to both : the configuration of physical and their metaphysical representation, that including modern physics.
I agree with the insufficiency of an absolute mathematical configuration, as long as a cohesive relative integration is presupposed within a general theory, with the form of description of such terms as claims can not define a merely singular frame of reference.
This appears a truism , yet excludes its own proposal because it also could lead to doubt that some instances of belief may be excluded from the proposition . It does , by degrees deconstruct the idea of developing a better, closer representation of the truth formerly described.
In that case I’m not sure what you mean by “doubting as a default position”. A ‘default position’ seems to be an abstract pile of turtles: a position held prior to encountering any specific claim (an “arbitrary” claim), and in relation to which any specific claim is initially considered.
Maybe your whole point is that one shouldn’t have a default position, but I’m not sure that’s possible – whatever it looks like to ‘not have a default position’ is itself a default position.
Here are three claims:
- “Most claims that people make are true”
- “Most claims that people make are false”
- “About half of the claims people make are true, and about half are false”
Good, then fill in the examples of what you mean by those claims. What are the specific claims?
Yeah, to your first point. But remember I am responding to a particular low-level and very common ‘academic’ perspective here. Doubt as such, all that. Descartes, Hume. This isn’t difficult.
Here is one:
But seriously, I don’t see how you aren’t doing abstract turtles here any less than I am. Talking about “default positions” is a claim about claims just the same as the claim that, “About half of the claims people make are true, and about half are false.”
If not, why not?
The claim-about-claims that I take them to be making is that we can only disprove claims, so any analysis should look like doubt.
It’s not academic in the modern pejorative sense, but in the older sense that it was discovered and understood by people with the spare time to think about e.g. how to discover truth. And it’s been super successful, it arguably kicked off modern science. I don’t think we’d have a hard time finding misuses/misunderstandings of it, but I think the underlying insight is good.
Doubt is a useful path to truth in a way that belief isn’t, so doubting by default is not as irrational as believing by default.
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Reminds me of a Boolean in programming lol. It’s basic logic, which applies to philosophy a whole deal.
The real problem with “fallacies” is that it is another instance of delegating reasoning to a blackboard.
One should be able to navigate every instance of an argument individually, without recourse to a category, for all instances of reason are unique, as they appeal to the interminable threads of the concrete to which they refer in any particular discussion. Anything that is real will have intereminable links to interminable other things, and it is only in adressing the thing particularly that these links are not betrayed.
In doing this, one may, first, see what truly does or does not fail reason in the argument, rather than shoving it into a preconstructed “fallacy” cabinet and miss anything that wasn’t on the label of the cabinet already, that is, anything that was actually said. Second, given that the real quesiton with fallacies is not about the proper employment of reason but about the level of honesty, one may get at the actual level of honesty to determine whether it can be negociated into reason, or will simply never lead to a reasoned discussion. You cannot talk dishonesty into honesty, at best you can determine its extent. The cabinet, here, will either shove an honest enough argument aside fruitlessly, or allow critical dishonesty to hide under categorically relegated honesty enough. If it is of interest to you, this approach will also allow you to arrive at the why of the dishonesty. For, is every great philosopher not also a psychologist?
It is yet another instance of academia attempting, and miserably failing, to imitate collectively what is essencially an individual act: thinking. Danking, if you will.
Which brings us to the true reason philosophers engage in discussion: because, in discussing a subject with another who devotes time to thinking, however honestly or dishonestly, if one’s mastery of reason is sharp and true, one effectively delegates reasoning time and energy to the correspondent. It is more like two merchants trading than like two lawyers determining. Whether the correspondents know it or not.
Fractals have limits/edges, and because the concrete and how we think balance each other and change each other, there will be similar patterns between them.
Thinkin’ cap (removes cap, then proceeds to scratch head)
If Parmenedies would/could/did have known the outcome of the race, he would have the turtle talk to the hare and advise him of not proceed to the starting gate at all, because they may have realized it to be a waste of time.
But if they had already took off and past the middle, they would have been able to go on with it instead of going back, because they may have anticipated an unnecessary turn, which the spectator(s) would have accounted for already, as the ragged edges could have obviously getting on to being smoothed out , anyway.
Unless they could realize the necessity for another primal fallacy, such as going back before approaching the starting gate, and successfully communicating this with each other in some kind of turtlehair language instantly developed from scratch and understood immediately.
Doubt has reasons for being what it is, same with belief. That was one thing I said. Another thing I said is that doubt for its own sake (without reasons backing it up) is just as irrational as is belief for its own sake. Granted, reasons ALWAYS exist even if the person doesn’t know what they are. Unconscious level reasons, for example. Emotional reactions, evolutionary nudges, cultural programming, etc. Those reasons could and should be individually analyzed to see to what extent they are actually legitimate. In some cases they might be, for strange reasons often unrelated to the claim in question.
There is no reason why doubt by itself, compared to belief by itself, would be more useful on the path to truth. You can doubt true things and you can believe false things. Do your experiences with life and the world show you more falsities than truths? If so, maybe you have a point. But that would seem to indicate some kind of problem with your own perception and epistemological process, and not a reflection on the points I was making here.
So then let me clarify, your point may indeed stand when it comes to people with very little truth-process or philosophical training or edification; people for whom the world is indeed a confusing mass of weird things they can’t properly contextualize or understand or evaluate. For such people, a default position of doubt might indeed be a useful starting point.
I should then also clarify, that I don’t write for the lowest common denominator, rather I write (and think) for and in terms of the highest possible level. Not for children or idiots. So I will acknowledge that your point may indeed apply for… those people. But not the meaning of what I was aiming at.
Your comments granted, but regardless, the higher state suggested here is reached by constructing them from bottom up, and as such the alternative sources have in fact started alongside each other.
The doubt was there as a point of conjecture as sophists tended to analyze each step of the way, wether be they pointing to some intrinsic unknowable triangulated source, or, if the prefiigurative consequental aim could be foreseen as possible.
That thesis was and still is tested as both needs increasing levels of compatibility, but in the middle, the mean expression of this process really took off in earnest about a thousand years after the initial doubt, and continued to the present day, and it appears at a critical time, when that difference is beginning to feel increasingly counter functional and ultimately unproductive , if a revision is attempted by recollecting all aspects of intermediary information that progressively constructed such.
The answer becomes apparent to the return to the x unknown ground of metaphysics, which turned out to be the relation of physis to what prompted that to return to the quantum configuration of it’s meta-magical reconstruction
Derivatives on the way down had / have to be searched by cross referencing all the original construct’s referential possibilities, but as supercomputing is rapidly increasing it’s learning capacity by series of 2X2 every year, the original hypothetical of narrowing the objective difference is coming soon, maybe less then a sentient generation hence.