Best epistemology books according to redditors
We found 234 Reddit comments discussing the best epistemology books. We ranked the 128 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 234 Reddit comments discussing the best epistemology books. We ranked the 128 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
I think you will learn the most by reading five textbooks, such as A History of Philosophy, volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5; or something like Metaphysics: The Fundamentals, The Fundamentals of Ethics, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, and An Introduction to Political Philosophy.
If what you have in mind is more of a "Great Books" program to get your feet wet with some classic works that are not too difficult, you could do a lot worse than:
Also, might be worth a Deke nomination, but I'm not gonna spend the time to make sure unless I also get paid for looking at his book. Oh and he also has a blog.
Some quotes from that page:
> I think most ethical discussions are framed incorrectly. Ethics is about intention, not actions or consequences. I am drawn to ethical nihilism, with one exception: love. Nothing matters except for love
He has also written on free will and doesn't know what compatibilism is, so I don't have high hopes. Oh, and then there's this:
> In my own research, I have discovered a consistent truth: the mainstream conclusions in any field of thought are wrong. And to my surprise, a great deal of confusion comes from mathematics. Modern irrationalism – the lazy acceptance of contradictions into one’s worldview – seems to stem from mathematical errors made around the turn of the 20th century
He has also solved the liar's paradox.
Edit: Also, calls himself an Anarchist(read: Ron Paul fanboy) and is surprised that nobody takes Austrian economics seriously.
I'm talking primarily about the type of people that only believe in the concept of free speech depending on who the speaker is and what the topic may be. People that will use a bullhorn to drown out an (admittedly despicable) white nationalist who is attempting to speak in a public place with the proper permits or invitation. This isn't how free speech is supposed to function, there is a reason that 'bad' speech should also be heard. Many reasons.
Another example may be to suggest that a western literature course should be more fairly balanced towards authors that are women and / or persons of color, so perhaps certain classics may need to be artificially weeded out to make room. This may seem like it isn't harmful - may even seem like the right thing to do on the face of it - but the true method of selection should have nothing to do with the gender or race of an author, but instead should be based on the content of the novel.
As a final example, think of how often you hear people appointing themselves as defenders of certain groups that they consider maligned. People who, perhaps with the best of intentions, appoint themselves the defenders of the LGBTQ community, or various people of color communities, or women or... whomever. These people are labeling and grouping people up in the most 'identity politics' type of manner possible. Most of the time they've never been selected as protectors or representatives by any individuals of said groups, let alone by actual groups of such people. Don't confuse this with someone speaking up when, say, a bigot begins spouting idiotic nonsense about some minority group - these are different situations.
These are a few of the more common examples that I've seen over the past five to ten years.... and I'm probably not very good at explaining this, so if you have any interest the best book I've read on the topic can be found here.
To quote a lifelong (and once published) philosopher and amateur [nearly anarcho-capitalist 😳] economist with whom I correspond with due to my meeting her son at school:
> I used to say “if Che looked like Mises and Mises looked like Che, we would’ve ended poverty by now.”
I’m not exactly a fan of the inherently anti-empirical Austrian economics, but I think this captures the extent to which personality and appearance skews our
political preferences — consciously or otherwise.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1405169664/ref=mp_s_a_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1519061739&sr=8-9&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=epistemology
Read this when I took a semester of all Philosophy courses. Epistemology is no joke. It can lead to depression, and suicidal thoughts due to the nihilistic nature of the subject. This book was really difficult though... I recommend taking a class either online for free or in college...
I wouldn't call this opposite, but Marcus Aurelius didn't think life was about pursuing pleasure while, by contrast, Epicurus thought the only objective in life was to pursue pleasure. However, Epicurus didn't define or describe pleasure in a hedonistic sense, as some might infer from the general idea that life should be about pursuing pleasure.
For example: "It is impossible to live a pleasant life without living wisely and honorably and justly, and it is impossible to live wisely and honorably and justly without living pleasantly. Whenever any one of these is lacking, when, for instance, the man is not able to live wisely, though he lives honorably and justly, it is impossible for him to live a pleasant life."
"The magnitude of pleasure reaches its limit in the removal of all pain. When such pleasure is present, so long as it is uninterrupted, there is no pain either of body or of mind or of both together."
Epicurus -- Principal Doctrines
Schopenhauer also believed that the only happiness possible in this life is the absence of pain.
Hedonism -- as a philosophy -- would identify pleasure, especially physical pleasure, as the highest good in life. And, unlike Marcus Aurelius, rejects the notion that virtue has intrinsic value. Search online for hedonistic philosophers to get a better sense.
Social Darwinism is the name given to the idea that only the fittest humans should survive and assistance should be denied to others for the sake of human progress. Some philosophers who held this view to one degree or another include Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton.
I'd highly encourage you to read Epicurus and the other epicurean philosophers, as well as Schopenhauer. The Social Darwinists can give you a philosophical approach that's very different than Marcus Aurelius, which is what you're looking for. But, Epicurus, the epicurean philosophers (http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Epicurean_philosophers), and Schopenhauer can also give you some divergent views, although not diametrically opposed.
Finally, I highly recommend the Skeptic philosophers, such as Montaigne and Diderot, if you're just getting started with studying philosophy. If you're interested, I'd suggest you start with this introductory overview/summary of the Skeptic philosophers and their doctrines:
http://www.amazon.com/Skepticism-Anthology-Richard-H-Popkin/dp/1591024749
I think studying philosophy is one of the most important, most life-changing, most interesting, and most enjoyable things any person can do. I very much wish I had started much earlier in life. It would've saved me from so much unnecessary pain and struggle and so many bad decisions.
Edit -- formatting
The way that they are reacting is actually statistically demonstrated by social scientists to be the most effective way for religious parents to influence their wayward children to eventually return to religious practice as they age: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/august-web-only/religion-runs-in-family.html
Also keep in mind the the statistical factor that is most likely to lead to a resuscitation of religious practice for a young adult who has strayed is marriage and children. The younger and less financially and socially stable you are when you have children, the more statistically likely you are to be hooked back into a religious community: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2013/july-web-only/is-family-decline-behind-religious-decline.html
Just make sure that you don't become a young parent, that you seek out secular communities like the Sunday Assembly etc., and that you do your research on miracles and revelation and philosophy, critical thinking, and science in general
The questions you're asking fall broadly under the province of what's sometimes called "social ontology." People who defend the independent reality of groups (see, for instance, this talk by John Searle)) often do so on the basis of believing in something like collective intentionality as an irreducible phenomenon. People on that side of the issue argue that groups of people (nations, sports teams, Reddit, &c.) can have intentional states like beliefs and desires that aren't just aggregates or sums of the intentional states of the individuals in the group. If that's true, then groups are worth taking seriously as ontologically distinct entities, since they have properties that aren't reducible to the properties of the individuals that compose them. John Searle defends this position in The Construction of Social Reality (which I quite like), arguing that there are "social facts" that cannot be reduced to facts about the beliefs of any well-defined set of individuals, but which are nonetheless mind-dependent (or "constructed"). He uses the example of the worth of a dollar bill: the fact that this piece of paper in my pocket is valid currency clearly rests on the fact that we believe it has value; a dollar is no more intrinsically valuable than any other piece of paper, and its status as a unit of exchange depends on it being treated as one. At the same time, Searle argues, the dollar's value isn't just a matter of opinion or taste--it really does have value in a strong, objective sense--and neither is it a matter of the beliefs of any individual (or set of individuals). There's no particular subset of people who are responsible for giving the dollar its value, and whose individual beliefs serve to ground the dollar's legitimacy as currency. Instead, Searle argues, the dollar's value is the result of a collective intentional state: it has value because society believes it does. It's worth noting that we talk this way all the time: we say things like "Twitter is obsessed with Prince today" or "the internet loves cat videos" or "the Catholic church believes abortion is immoral." If those statements are really just disguised statements about the intentional states of some specific set of individuals, at the very least it's not obvious that this is so.
In contrast, people who endorse methodological individualism argue that any intentional states of groups (or really any social-level phenomena at all) can be understood in terms of the intentional states (or other properties) of the individuals in that group, and so our ontology ought to include only individuals. Methodological individualism is attractive to many people who have libertarian-leaning political views, and underwrites a lot of the theoretical literature supporting libertarianism and free-market ideologies. People who endorse methodological individualism think that any form of collectivism represents a kind of metaphysical mistake, and so there can be no sense in which you have (say) a duty or obligation to a group as a whole; you might have an obligation to several individuals, but that's it--there's no independent collective entity that might have rights, duties, obligations, beliefs, or anything else like that.
I strongly favor the former position. As a number of other commenters have pointed out, there's a clear analogy between this discussion and discussions about mereological sums more generally. If you endorse methodological individualism when it comes to persons, then you need to (at least) give an account of why the mereological decomposition stops there as opposed to somewhere else. That is, if you think that social groups are reducible to mere collections of persons (and so aren't properly included in our ontology), then why can't the same thing be said of persons themselves? After all, individual persons are "mere" collections of individual cells, which are "mere" collections of molecules, which are "mere" collections of atoms, and so on down the line. Unless you can give an account of why persons are metaphysically distinctive composite objects, it's very hard to avoid sliding from methodological individualism into total mereological nihilism.
The standard response here is to appeal to something like the autonomous agency of individual persons as a way of backstopping the reductive slide. We might think that persons are "legitimate" composite objects in virtue of the fact that they're organized, functionally-integrated, fully autonomous entities, not just collections of parts. It's hard for me to see why the same thing isn't true of social groups, though. There are many obvious examples of groups acting as autonomous entities and pursuing their own goals in a way that's not clearly reducible to a story about individual persons pursuing individual goals.
The immediate timely example that springs to mind is the US Presidential election that's going on right now. At this point, it looks virtually certain that the next President of the United States is going to be either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. Both Clinton and Trump have overwhelmingly high unfavorability ratings among US voters--Trump is the most widely disliked major Presidential candidate in history, and Clinton is the second most widely disliked. Given that fact, it seems incredibly bizarre that both of them are virtual locks on for their respective party's nomination at this point, which guarantees that we're going to elect either the first or second most disliked candidate available to us. It's hard to see how to explain that from the perspective of methodological individualism: if individual preferences were all that mattered, it would seem that being very widely disliked would be a deal-breaker for someone trying to win a popular election.
The reason that it isn't a deal-breaker, of course, is because the structure of our social organizations matters here, in the sense of having a real causal impact on election outcomes and meaningfully constraining the behavior of individuals in our society. The way both parties nominate candidates, the laws regulating campaigns, the way popular votes are translated into delegates, the way the Electoral College works, and other social-level phenomena have extremely significant sway over how elections come out, such that it's very plausible that the eventual winner of the election will be the person with the lowest popular favorability rating among all the major candidates.
This isn't a unique example, either: groups of individuals take actions that are contrary to the interests and desires of many (or even all) of the individuals themselves all the time, which is why collective action problems (like stopping climate change) are so difficult to solve. The most reasonable explanation for this, I think, is that social groups--like other highly organized composite systems--can be structured in such a way that they impose novel constraints on the behavior of their component parts, and so have causally-significant properties that aren't just reducible to the causally-significant properties of those parts. I've argued that the appearance of this sort of irreducible inter-scale (i.e. "top-down") constraint is a general feature of complex systems, and ought to be expected whenever we have collections of individuals with significant organizational structure. Whether that's true or not, though, it seems hard to maintain that social groups are ersatz objects that don't deserve to be included in our ontology given the incredible proliferation of this kind of behavior. Groups play central, indispensable roles in a wide variety of our explanations and predictions all the time. If that doesn't make them real, I don't know what would.
Well, in short, even though scientism is a tempting position because of our cultural exaltation of science as some sort of special and super-objective category of knowledge, there are all sorts of ways of discovering facts that don't rely on physical evidence. Consider mathematical proofs, they do not require any physical evidence but rather logical deduction.
Here's a good book on basic theory of knowledge.
>Would one have to argue for why humor is subjective? Or for why beauty is subjective? Or is it understood that these are matters of opinion as they exist only as constructs of the mind?
I'm just asking for arguments that morality is subjective. Surely isn't ludicrous to request arguments for a person's beliefs. Consider the same tactic used by a moral realist:
"You mean I have to argue that the Holocaust or torturing babies is objectively moral!?"
Also, assuming that these other kinds of value are subjective, how is that an argument for moral value being subjective? The argument seems to be this:
P) Most kinds of X are Y
C) Therefore, all kinds of X are Y.
But this is a fallacious inference; just replace 'X' with 'swans' and 'Y' with 'white'.
As for arguments for moral realism, The SEP article's on moral realism, moral non-naturalism, and moral naturalism would be good places to start. Moral Realism: A Defence by Russ Shafer-Landau and Taking Morality Seriously by David Enoch are two book length treatments.
I only mentioned the PhilPapers survey to suggest a bit of humility in discussing these matters.
For Kierkegaard, the ideality of being an individual is not a Platonic Idea, but something we strive to become. This does not logically presuppose or imply subjectivism or constructivism vis-à-vis the reality of that becoming.
Besides that, human “constructs” are already themselves a part of reality (a part of “social reality,” as Searle would put it). So if there is “not reason to think the world of the ‘ideal’ contains such a thing,” that may have more to do with your particular conceptions of reality, of ‘the ideal’, and of their relationship—and not with any defect in Kierkegaard’s conceptions.
Wow, you really have been infected with some of the worst philosophical viruses out there. To uninstall these viruses I suggest you read Daniel Dennett's essays on philosophical zombies, qualia, and the so-called "hard problem". Actually all of these topics are in one book! Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking
Here is a contemporary epistemology anthology by Robert Audi and Michael Huemer that's focused on the justification of knowledge. Preview the table of contents for a list of all the readings!
And, here is a brilliant list written up by /u/voltimand:
What is the value of knowledge?
Methodological questions
Is knowledge the norm of assertion? That is, should we assert p only if we know p?
Is knowledge the norm of practical reason? That is, ought we only to act on facts we know, rather than believe?
Is the principle of epistemic closure right?
Can knowledge ever be gained by inference from a false belief?
Maybe try Robert Audi's or Michael William's introduction. They come at issues from somewhat different angles, but both are quite good.
Try LA Paul's Transformative Experience, and maybe Ruth Chang's TED Talk on hard choices.
Also Williamson's Tetralogue is great, and Frankfurt's On Bullshit is a lot of fun, and politically relevant.
Wish I had time to engage properly today but I don't. Here's some well regarded arguments for realism you can look into if you haven't already.
Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously Shafer-Landau's [Moral Realism: a Defense] (https://www.amazon.com/Moral-Realism-Defence-Russ-Shafer-Landau/dp/0199280207/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=CNVDTNHGJW3FHXNR8821), Oddie's Value, Reality and Desire, Huemer's Ethical Intuitionism, Parfit's On What Matters Wedgwood's The Nature of Normativity, Cuneo's The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism.
And here's some free papers you can read (too lazy to name them all, sorry):
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Richard_Boyd5/publication/240034001_How_to_Be_a_Moral_Realist/links/556f6f4308aec226830aab09/How-to-Be-a-Moral-Realist.pdf
http://www.academia.edu/4116101/Why_Im_an_Objectivist_about_Ethics_And_Why_You_Are_Too_
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=433000088031098030104101075089022124028072042008084011092124087113084016108098084005098003032035018116033080110110127020085084106080012039033080068103113067015099089032030091083096096084064089109093065079071016028099008078093021125125068072101086002&EXT=pdf
https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=207103102008006126082026003080087077015002001000090086121025066112086090029103080091030096049125038001052020081100031102121000046002046043009065006112075102115099049080048111067091106094117103109111097113120126103124079110093018090122114122112110007&EXT=pdf
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~umer/teaching/intro181/readings/shafer-Landau2005EthicsAsPhilosophyADefenseOfEthicalNonnaturalism.pdf
http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1007/s11245-016-9443-7?author_access_token=R2EN7zieClp6VWWEo8DyZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY6_LyD8T3yNLLNQUBcKQRpfV5lbirZE36eSIc6PLipzIUjIvQrTe9aO4meFw0oJ_Dp784B0R9TnA9qTFaNLe9oWPQUaroxf3o-BsITKWjp_6Q%3D%3D
http://www.owl232.net/5.htm
Feldman's Epistemology is one of the standard intro textbooks.
Duncan Pritchard has a book called What is this Thing Called Knowledge?. I've not read it, but that series is decent, from what I can tell, and Pritchard is one of the foremost epistemologists right now.
The way you describe your epistemology is VERY similar to what Russell thought. See "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description" and maybe also "On Denoting". I'd then just suggest reading through something like Blackwell's anthology on epistemology (I find they usually include the core historical essays): http://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Anthology-Blackwell-Philosophy-Anthologies/dp/1405169664/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347037489&sr=8-1&keywords=blackwell+epistemology
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M9JL27L/
Though honestly it's a little tedious and drawn out. It's not expensive though and it's very short. Steve Patterson has a youtube channel as well, so maybe it could have been summarized in a 10 minute video rather than book format.
Well we can't use our existence as evidence regarding the prior probability that humans would exist up until now because of anthropic bias. If humans had gone extinct, we wouldn't observe it. So it is plausible that the chance of human extinction (or failure to evolve) was very high. You may want to read https://www.amazon.com/Anthropic-Bias-Observation-Selection-Philosophy/dp/0415883946.
>Given the natural inferiority of our bodies in comparison with stronger potential predators,
That's not really how it works, evolutionary competition is not a one-dimensional scale of strength... chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans are weaker than other 'potential predators' but they survive just fine, because their survival does not depend on being stronger. You seem to think that without the modern mind, we wouldn't be able to survive at all, but I can't think of any reason to believe that. Just because we need the modern mind in order to dominate the planet doesn't mean that we need it to survive.
Were early hominids unfit for survival? Well the evidence says no, because they did survive. This wasn't a single probabilistic event, it is clear that they lived in large numbers over a very long period of time and that necessarily implies that they were fit for the environmental conditions that they faced.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/
There are lots of introductions to epistemology, as a quick search on Amazon indicates:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=epistemology&sprefix=epist%2Cstripbooks
I haven't read most of them, but based on the authors and publishers, I expect these to be solid surveys:
http://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Contemporary-Introduction-Introductions-Philosophy/dp/041587923X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416622594&sr=1-1&keywords=epistemology
http://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Richard-Feldman/dp/0133416453/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=1NPT7RZ11R84R4WD6B1T
Read an intro to epistemology textbook. This will give you the basics of various theories of knowledge. I really liked this one.
It depends what you're trying to get out of it.
There are literally hundreds of introductory texts for first-order logic. Other posters can cover them. There's so much variety here that I would feel a bit silly recommending one.
For formal tools for philosophy, I would say David Papineau's Philosophical Devices. There's also Ted Sider's Logic for Philosophy but something about his style when it comes to formalism rubs me the wrong way, personally.
For a more mathematical approach to first-order logic, Peter Hinman's Fundamentals of Mathematical Logic springs to mind.
For a semi-mathematical text that is intermediate rather than introductory, Boolos, Burgess, and Jeffrey's Computability and Logic is the gold standard.
Finally, if you want to see some different ways of doing things, check out Graham Priest's An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic.
The following is not my argument in that I did not invent it. But it objectively exists, and it concludes that moral norms are objective. I find the argument quite persuasive.
(1), (2), (4) and (5) are all premises that are well supported by evidence. Feel free to peruse the literature surrounding moral realism in metaethics and intuitionism in epistemology if you'd like to check out that evidence. Accepting these premises, (6) follows validly. The step from (6) to (7) is not truth preserving, but any rational person who accepts (6) must also accept (7).
There: an argument for the existence of objective morals. It's one that's received a fair bit of discussion in recent years - enough that I, a non-specialist, am familiar with it. As I said, the evidence for the premises can be found in the relevant literature. I'd suggest checking it out before you make judgments about the truth of those premises, but even if you won't do that you'll surely admit that it's an objective fact that an argument for objective morals exists. I've just shown you one.
edit: formated the argument better
edit2: I should say, as far as I can tell this argument has recently been discussed due to the defence of it given by David Enoch. I believe that defence is presented in this book. But, like I've said, I'm not a specialist. Perhaps someone better informed could come along and make more solid recommendations.
You might look at one of the newer textbooks on epistemology, such as Robert Audi's Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction. If you'd rather work mostly from primary source readings, you could go with the readings volume that goes with that textbook. Those would get you up to speed with the contemporary parts of the field pretty quickly, I think.
You might be interested in the work of John Basl, an important part of his work deals with the ethics of AI and sentiocentrism.
https://philpapers.org/rec/BASTEO-11
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-death-of-the-ethic-of-life-9780190923877?cc=us&lang=en&
On the question of brains being computers I'd check Daniel C. Dennett's *Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking." Several of his "intuition pumps" deal with this theme. In the book he usually mentions authors and works that oppose his ideas.
https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1491518871
https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking-ebook/dp/B00AR354AQ/
A bit academic, but interesting enough.
Dennett's Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking gives a really good rundown of thinking tools and thought experiments.
The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism is always a good read if you haven't read it. I managed to get a second-hand copy off AbeBooks for $36 (plus shipping) a few months back, maybe you'll find it a used bookstore for less?
Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism is also pretty good stuff. Bought it for $29 last year from my university's used bookstore.
Especially interesting, if you're an anti-realist (or have anti-realist sympathies) like me. Only issue is I'm not sure how challenging this would be ~~for a
2nd year student.~~
EDIT: not sure why thought you were a second year student.
Best place to start for overview of skeptical philosophy from ancient through modern times: http://www.amazon.com/Skepticism-Anthology-Richard-H-Popkin/dp/1591024749.
Afterwards, select the most intriguing philosophers and read them in more detail.
Also, read anything about quantum theory and modern cosmology.
This is a great starting point that will,also amaze you:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Holographic-Universe-Revolutionary-Reality/dp/0062014102
24 years ago was a better time for me as well.
"The Prince" [Niccolò Machiavelli]
"The Demon-Haunted World [Carl Sagan]
"Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" [Douglas Hofstadter]
"On War" [Carl von Clausewitz]
"Intuition Pumps And Other Tools For Thinking" [Daniel C. Dennett]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZBDUJ0yiVg
I think it's like this parable of the blind wise men and the elephant. One takes the trunk and says it's a snake, the next takes a leg and says it's a tree, another one takes the tail and says it's a horse and the last one touches the side and says it's a rock. Each has direct empirical sensory evidence for his claim, but they all have a different perspective and until they try to take in all of the evidence available they will stay with limited understanding.
That's the problem.
It's not: "We have eyes, therefore we can't see.", it's "We all have eyes and see from different perspectives. How do we put this together to learn about the world of which we all focus on different aspects?"
It's of no help to say "I have the right perspective." just as it's of no help to say that we are blind.
I think Stove is throwing out the baby with the bathwater and there is quite some degree of strawman argumentation in this and it appears to be pretty polemic.
If you like naiive realism, you may want to check out this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Slightest-Philosophy-Quee-Nelson/dp/1598583786/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348922628&sr=8-1&keywords=the+slightest+philosophy
I think you would love David Hume.
http://www.amazon.com/Hume-Enquiry-Concerning-Human-Understanding/dp/0872202291/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1381844680&sr=8-1&keywords=an+enquiry+concerning+human+understanding
It's a relatively short but very profound read. Basically he concludes that "logic" is a direct result of experience and not of a priori type rationalism. He also concludes that the notion that the future will always resemble the past is just an assumption and unprovable. According to him one cannot prove or disprove the statement "the sun will not rise tomorrow" until it is actually witnessed. The fact that it has risen every single time before does not in any way guarantee that it will rise again (the future resembling the past). The only way one can prove or disprove this statement is to sit there and wait until the next day and see what happens: experience.
His whole idea is that we accept something as "truth" after witnessing a so called effect rise from a so called cause a certain number of times. He calls this "constant conjunction".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant_conjunction
edit: It is commonly stated that Hume has never been refuted. Kant tried, and it is up to you to decide if he was successful. But other than potentially Kant, his work has not been refuted.
There's been a good amount of relatively recent philosophical work on breaking down dichotomies. There's an essay in this book about breaking down one of the most classic dichotomies: subjective/objective.
As I pointed out in one of my earlier posts, typically arguments for morality don't waste a lot of time proving that morality exists - this is what almost everyone already believes, and the worry is usually just that we can't fit morality into our more general picture of the world or that someone has come up with arguments against morality that we need to defuse.
If you're starved for positive arguments, David Enoch's Taking Morality Seriously contains a nice positive argument in favor of moral realism, which is one kind of moral theory. In general, though, the burden of proof is typically seen to lie on people like you, who make implausible claims like "I could barbecue a live baby right now and there wouldn't be a goddamn thing wrong with that, suck on that moralists!"
You might be especially interested in Chris Matthew Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical for a comprehensive and careful overview of Rand's philosophy as well as its place in the "dialectical" tradition of thought (rooted in her case in Aristotle rather than Hegel or Marx). One thing to keep in mind is that Rand considered politics to be subordinate in the philosophical hierarchy to epistemology and ethics, which are the focus of Sciabarra's work as well as those of Allan Gotthelf (also a leading Aristotle scholar) and Tara Smith.
>The epistemological ideas form Rand come from Max Stirner, and Egoist and epistemological relativist whose ideas on how man operates in society are directly opposed by Kropotkin's book, along with Rand's, which came from Stirner.
You don't know jack shit about Ayn Rand. The only philosopher to whom she acknowledged an intellectual debt was Aristotle, and noted Aristotle scholars today (Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller) who also study Rand recognize major similarities between the two.
For anyone who wants to read what someone with an actual fucking clue about Objectivism has to say about her epistemology, this book (edited by Gotthelf) came out just in the last few days.
I don't anticipate the Rand-bashers having the combination of guts and intellectual wherewithal to attack Gotthelf's interpretations as unsound. Their past performance is too pitifully bad to expect anything remotely of the sort. The only activity they seem capable of mustering these days is simply downvoting comments which factually defend Rand's ideas against ignorant attacks.
Can we link to Amazon? FWIW, this book is a really clearly written--but not at all sophomoric--introduction to epistemology, which is a pretty central theme/issue in philosophy for lots of reasons. (Just in case the link doesn't work, it's Michael Williams' Critical Introduction to Epistemology)
https://www.amazon.com/Problems-Knowledge-Critical-Introduction-Epistemology/dp/0192892568/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517609206&sr=8-1&keywords=michael+williams+epistemology
EDIT: I know you said you don't want "known philosopher's work" but I took that to mean the 'classics', so to speak, of which this book is not really one... but sorry if you were explicitly not looking for book recommendations!
You might want to check out Dennett's recent book on intuitions, thought experiments, and the like:
https://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1491518871
In a similar vein, if you're looking for scholarly essays on thought experiments, I remember that James R. Brown had some interesting ideas on the topic. I started accumulating a pretty thick binder in the 90s with essays on thought experiments, so there's definitely a robust literature out there.
I just finished Intuition Pumps by Daniel Dennett. In addition to presenting a variety of thought experiments, Dennett outlines some strategies for thinking about and critiquing said experiments.
The Philosophy Gym is another anthology that might fit the bill. I first encountered this book in a high school philosophy course and remember enjoying it a great deal.
I'll just leave this here.
Continued from the comment above...
> How come God is in an eternal war with Satan? How can an angel of God be mightier than the almighty? Can't God just zap him out of existence?
Yes, God can just zap Satan out of existence. The traditional answer to your question from both a Jewish and a Christian angle is that God has chosen to use Satan to accomplish God's purposes. Exactly how that all goes down is the subject of literally libraries worth of interpretation, discussion, and theological reflection. Let's bracket it for the time being for the sake of brevity since there's not as great a conflict here between the Christian and Jewish understandings on this point as is the case for the other points you mentioned.
> How do Christians view Jews?
There is no consensus. Many highly admire Jews; others hate Jews; still others are ambivalent. I would guess that most Christians respect the Jews but also completely misunderstand them. Most Christians don't know what most Jews believe or how most Jews act, and most Christians suffer from an anemic doctrine of Israel insofar as systematic theology is concerned. This is something that has only lately begun to recover from centuries of neglect; check out R. Kendal Soulen's The God of Israel and Christian Theology for a jump start.
> Are we lost?
Not all of us! Scripture teaches us that God has always preserved a "remnant," a righteous group of Jewish people who seek God's face according to God's ways. See Genesis 45:7, 2 Kings 19:30, Ezra 9:8, Isaiah 37:32, and Micah 5:8 for some Old Testament examples. Romans 9-11 shows how all of this works right up to a New Testament context, which should be a mission-critical text for you to consider.
> Are we wrong?
Both the average Jew and the average Christian are wrong because their respective theological loci have developed in opposition to each other rather than in harmony with the Bible.
> How do you understand our differences?
See above. Or please elaborate if you want more specific detail!
> This is a bigger question, but I'm curious to see the response. How does the Jewish bible work? How do you know it to be true? It would have to be true for your religion to be true, correct? How does the old testament flow into the new testament?
The Old Testament is most of the Bible, and it is the only Bible that both Jesus and the early church possessed when they spoke of the scriptures, the Law, the prophets, etc. Taking each part of this question in turn based on this first point:
Woot. We're down to your last paragraph:
> I look forward to the answers. All I ask is that you cite verses you use to answer the questions so I can follow along. I have a copy of the NIV bible along with a Hebrew/English translation of the 5 books of Moses. Also, don't be afraid to not be politically correct. I won't be offended if you call me a Jesus killer or tell me I'm going to hell for not accepting your beliefs today. Be blunt, be honest, be direct. I plan on responding back as soon as possible. And feel free to ask me questions back.
I'll save my questions until I've first heard your feedback on my responses; in the mean time, I'll take care of getting offended at anybody who might call you a Jesus killer (since it is for all of our sins that he laid down his life) or that you're going to hell for not accepting somebody else's beliefs (since this is really sloppy theological language). In the mean time, shalom...
It's not that entire universities are plagued by postmodern thinking. Postmodernism as it relates to art and subjective things has its place, and I think it's interesting, even sometimes valuable. But it is rare that postmodernism is treated as belonging only to the area of subjective topics, as it often is incorporated in other areas in which it cannot contribute something substantial.
Humanities departments in universities are the primary source of postmodern scholarship, in departments like English, Sociology, Communications, History, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, Cultural and Social Anthropology. It is not unusual for members of these departments to extend postmodernism to areas it doesn't belong, like science. In fact, there are quite a few books written by scientists and academics addressing this very problem.
The links in my previous post also do a fine job of outlining the problem.
The book you have linked is anthology of texts by various writers whereas Audi's book is a textbook by a single author. So I would imagine it would be easier to follow Audi's book for people that are new to epistemology. I also remember reading some chapters from Richard Feldman's Epistemology in an undergraduate course and they have been quite well written.
>Asking the questions you did means that you don't know philosophy. They were not real questions.
They were certainly real questions, questions very much associated with philosophy. My question was about your standard for evaluating the truth of a philosophy, a question of epistemology. Your first post indicated that the way you evaluate the truth of certain arguments is whether other people, those who are stated experts in philosophy, agree or disagree with them.
I thought this could not be your ultimate standard, so I asked, hoping for a clearer presentation of your view. Instead, I get the answer that either states that the standards of philosophy are readily apparent, or that I am a lost cause for inquiring into your personal metric for evaluating truth.
What I got after that was more examples of appeals to authority and majorities, with no discussion of the content and arguments of Rand's work. What's more, the appeals to authority are false in fact.
> Ayn Rand is not considered a serious scholar by academics, nor by anyone who studies real philosophers like Kant or Sartre.
Allan Gotthelf, who is considered a high-quality thinker and writer on Aristotelian philosophy, has written many books and articles on the topic of Rand and Objectivism in a very positive light.
http://www.amazon.com/Concepts-Their-Role-Knowledge-Philosophical/dp/0822944243
http://www.amazon.com/Metaethics-Egoism-Virtue-Normative-Philosophical/dp/0822944006/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-5
http://www.amazon.com/Ayn-Rand-Philosopher-Wadsworth/dp/0534576257/ref=sr_1_9?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397776414&sr=1-9
But go ahead, laugh me off.
EDIT: Wrong preposition.
You have good instincts to question your own knowledge. All too often, especially among newly converted atheist communities, you find an arrogance of self-understanding rivaled only by theist counterparts. In many cases, the only thing that changes in the conversion is the content of the beliefs, and not the arrogance and radicalism that goes with some strains of theism.
You might find this book on the history and philosophy of science interesting. It's an easy read. This book takes a more philosophical approach and some of the readings will be more difficult, but you still should be able to learn a great deal.
You could also follow along with a syllabus like this and you'll learn a lot.
>(black holes, statistical data of really any kind, macro scale evolution)
Forget the big stuff. Here's something to ponder: what direct evidence do you have that we live in a heliocentric, and not a geocentric universe? We take it for granted that this is the case today, but if you look at the actual things you experience (e.g. the sun's transversal of the sky), the more intuitive explanation is that we're at the center. We know now that this is the case, but it took a lot of work to figure that out (which you can read about in the first book I mentioned).
This anthology of articles is great. The reading list for any undergraduate course in Epistemology will include at least some of the articles it has.
> I didn't know that their were multiple versions of metaphysical naturalism, thats very interesting.
For this, I'd recommend looking at Quine, Peirce, Nietzsche, Early Wittgenstein.
> Anything i can read that would expand on these other versions of naturalism?
Well, to put it plainly, secular philosophies - both naturalistic and non-naturalistic - have dominated the discipline of philosophy for more than a century. So your best bet would be to acquire a passing familiarity with philosophy generally (/r/askphilosophy and the Stanford Encyclopedia Of Philosophy are good starting points).
But I'll also throw up a few resources that I prefer for their engaging style:
Good luck with Nagel!
If I'm going with the shallow response (which is what I take the self-defeating argument to be, really), then you still haven't answered the criticism. (It works for moral relativism, too.) That's just as well, though, because I don't have enough time today to do a big comment thread.
If you're interested in this topic, I recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Fear-Knowledge-Against-Relativism-Constructivism/dp/0199230412
I like it quite a lot. I'm not sure I always agree with Boghossian, but he makes some darn good points here.
Epistemic relativism and how to argue against it. Just ordered Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge.
If you're willing to do soul crushing research:
Investigate the rise of post-modernism. From its religious anti-Enlightenment roots. To its modern incarnation as identity politics. There's a rather dry, but insightful book on the subject. It dives deep into the actual philosophy of the movement.
Cross-reference that with the timeline of communism switching from economics tactics of revolution to identity politics in the late 60s. Read David Horowitz's memoir, for a personal anecdotal account of that era.
Note how the majority of "radical" feminists are open marxist. Note how "Patriarchy" and "the System" is just another term for America and the processes that made America the great land it was. Note the goal of "smashing the Patriarchy" is a call to destroy democracy and liberty. Note that the "Patriarchy" is just a rebranding of communist "bourgeoisie", and feminists themselves a rephrase of the proletariat. Note the attack on Free Speech and the right of association--literal pillars of American life--are being hacked away by progressive ideology.
You might get a lot out of John Searle's The Construction of Social Reality which deals more with ontology than ethics, but in that sense I think it's more interesting.
As far as I remember, most of his ideas are generally compatible with theistic and atheistic ideas of "reality."
"Nonphysical" is just a term and it needs a context. Again, I think your question isn't clear enough to answer. Let me just recommend a book that I think will address much of what I think you're interested in.
The Construction of Social Reality by philosopher John Searle.
I would recommend this book if you are just starting out (which you appear to be), and I really wouldn't advise starting with historical texts, they are fun but a text book of sorts does a much better job as a primer.
>If ascribing knowledge to S requires S believing a true proposition...
Ascribing conceptual knowledge to S requires S believing a true proposition. Perceptual knowledge (like that held by other animals) does not.
>...how does light hitting retinas or synapses firing cross from non-propositional, non-believed non-truth to propositional, believed truth according to Rand?
Just like any other animal, your brain automatically learns to put the sensations of light hitting retinas, etc. together into perceptions of entities. The starting point of human conceptual knowledge is this stage of entity perception.
The human being then focuses on certain entities from current and remembered perceptions, seeing their differences and relative similarities. Entities that can be differentiated from all others and viewed as similar to each other in certain respects can be mentally grouped and integrated into a concept. The perceptible characteristics the entities have in common are retained, but the specific measurements of those characteristics (differences within the range of "similarity") in each particular are omitted. This would be a first-level concept of a type of entity (say, "rock" or "table.")
Rand's theory of perception and conceptualization is covered in much greater detail in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology
Once someone has concepts, he can form propositions and apply them to the situations/states/attributes of perceived entities. This is something like a reverse of the process of concept formation. The process of concept formation is like an induction (particular to general) and the process of concept/proposition application is like a syllogistic deduction (general to particular.)
I'm definitely not denying the usefulness of skepticism or epistemology (or philosophy). I'm a habitual devil's advocate - I think strongly challenging and testing beliefs plays an important role in discovering where a belief fits in our "scope of truth."
However, when I mention the Matrix, I'm thinking specifically about the brain in a vat problem ("We're all in a simulation!"). It's an interesting idea that plays off of an "obvious" truth (we can't step outside of our minds), but it doesn't provide much practical value beyond intellectual fancying (which is fine, but it's nothing more than that). I feel a similar way about David Chalmers philosophical zombies too.
Don't get me wrong, I think thought experiments can be valuable (I like many of the ones Daniel Dennett describes in his book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking), but they also have a tendency to come off more insightful than they really are.
I recognize philosophy as very important and very practical to know (in general), but some philosophy is definitely more practical than others. That's the lesson I gain from pragmatism.
We are nearly in a new era for most people in the West, especially, that is called postmodernism. Those who subscribe to these belief describe themselves as post modernists as described by philospher Stephen Hicks in his book Explaining Postmodernism:
https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau-ebook/dp/B005D53DG0/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&linkCode=ll1&tag=epact&linkId=c4b6919e8aae23984578628924f18a37
In regards to the Russel bit, I think getting into any of his technical works is a mistake for a noob, but this is necessary foundational reading for an amateur who isn't going to college for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy
In my view as an autodidact to philosophy, this was an excellent introduction. I think people really should not be reading selected specific academic works like Rem has suggested without guidance from a professor/teacher. One I've seen suggested before for a typical starting out laymen is:
https://www.amazon.com/Tetralogue-Im-Right-Youre-Wrong/dp/0198728883
My Grandma enjoyed it, she's the most educated person in the family with a Master's in English but never engaged in Philosophy before. If she can read into it amateurly and understand it at 82, no one else has got an excuse.
If people really want to dive deeper, they really should go to college, or just buy a bunch of used books and plow through them, read the IEP and SEP articles on the subjects, compare their understanding with peer-reviewed understandings, etc...
A couple of books you might find useful:
The book Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking is a great place to start.
Your specific question isn't related because it seems to be due to a confusion, but more generally yes it is related in that there is a lot of work being done in trying to understand how to connect the Born rule to how you "count" the number of worlds. If you really want to dive into this stuff, I can recommend two resources:
Anthropic Bias, by Bostrom (or download legally here)
Everett's thesis (you can also find the thesis online, although this book includes some good commentary)
> one is in THIS one
But "this" one only means the one you're in. No matter which one you were in, that would be "this" one to you.
If you draw from an urn of poker chips while blindfolded, and there are many more white chips than red, if you have to make a guess whether you're holding a white chip or a red one, white is the best guess. It doesn't mean you know for sure or you've proven it, just that it's the best assumption to make.
To extend the analogy back to Bostrom's argument, he's saying that white chips, signifying simulated universes, assuming for the sake of argument they are possible, would be great in number. He is basing that assessment on our own experience with the utility and popularity of simulation and simulated toy worlds.
>And we don't know how many others simulated or not there are
We do not. Bostrom's reasoning is that, if a civilization develops the technology to run simulations, they would not run it merely in one instance, no more than we developed Virtual Machine frameworks only to run one VM instance. They didn't make Sim City and run the program once. So, his arguments hold, either simulation is impossible, or simulations will be great in number. He doesn't purport to prove that simulating a universe is possible, but he's saying, if you accept these premises, then...
>if we fail to make any simulations this will not mean we know this is real and not simulated.
We already have simulations, just simplified ones. The point is not that we will "know" that our universe is simulated vs real, either way, rather what it is reasonable to assume given the premises.
>that makes no difference to our knowledge of the number of other universes which may or may not exist.
If we manage to simulate universes, that will be proof that doing so is not impossible. We will have established that it can be done. We won't have proven that other technological civilizations exist, or that they engage in universe-simulation, but proving it isn't the point. This is not a scientific hypothesis. Bostrom is a philosopher, and he's exploring reasoning first explored by Brandon Carter in his doomsday argument. It's also an extension of ideas Bostrom explored in his book Anthropic Bias.
Read this then let's talk: http://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/0393348784/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422159073&sr=8-1&keywords=intuition+pump.
A book that presents a cynical, nihilistic theory of knowledge or a critique of rationality won't be an introductory book for the study of knowledge. https://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Contemporary-Readings-Routledge-Philosophy/dp/0415259215 this book has some background info and essays from various authors that are relevant to most areas of the study of knowledge (origin of knowledge, structure of knowledge, skepticism). Bit dry but it's useful for getting a foundation on the subject.
John Searle just wrote a book "The Construction of Social Reality" that looks at money in depth, and how we can give something value just by saying it has value. http://www.amazon.com/Construction-Social-Reality-John-Searle/dp/0684831791
You can also listen to the class he teaches on it at Berkley for free.
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details_new.php?seriesid=2009-D-67309
David Enoch has a fairly well known argument for moral objectivism that goes something like this:
Suppose we were going on a hike, and came across a lost puppy. And suppose that while I want to take the puppy with us and try to find its owner, you want to torture and kill the puppy. We have entered into a deep and seemingly irresolvable disagreement. Now the question is: should I stand my ground and demand that you not torture the puppy, and even prevent you from torturing the puppy? Or should I opt for an impartial solution: maybe we torture and kill the puppy this time, and the next time we take care of it and find its owner.
The answer seems obvious, I should stand my ground.
But then notice how different this is from a case of disagreement over what we should do when the only relevant factors at play are preferences. If you want to go to the movies and I want to go play video games, I certainly should not stand my ground and demand that you do what I want to do. In this case I should seek out an impartial solution: maybe we go to the movies this time, and next time we will go play video games.
The subjectivist cannot accommodate these facts, because on subjectivism the moral factors are just matters of preference. On subjectivism the first case is like the second, and you should not stand your ground.
So simply put the argument might go like this:
This is Enoch's book, which I don't actually recommend for the most part except for the single chapter where he fleshes out this argument: https://www.amazon.ca/Taking-Morality-Seriously-Defense-Realism/dp/0199683174.
I don't see why you need more background in epistemology to get started on ethics (if you are worried you won't understand how philosophers come to conclusions in ethics, then you should pick up a book on philosophical methodology, e.g. "how to be a philosopher" books, not epistemology books). If you feel like you do, this book comes highly recommended (ernest sosa knows his stuff about knowing, and he liked it a lot):
http://www.amazon.com/Problems-Knowledge-Critical-Introduction-Epistemology/dp/0192892568
Since intuition comes up a lot in ethics, you may also like some of plantinga's stuff, e.g. Faith and Reason. Although some parts are technical, plantinga has a really fun way of showing how much of knowledge has nothing to do with inference or evidence.
>Why exactly shouldn't I doubt my own reasoning? Can you elaborate on "You have no way to get out of it"? Why will I stop learning and not make any great ideas?
If you endorse extreme skepticism, doubt that you know anything at all and doubt all methods of obtaining knowledge, then it's literally impossible for you to learn anything.
>Yes I am currently undergoing an epistemology crisis and would love my view to be changed and any other readings you can present to me would be great.
Okay, here's some reading assignments:
The Problem of the Criterion by Roderick Chisholm - A good introduction to the difference between particularism (what I'm advocating for), methodism, and skepticism.
Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? by Edmund Gettier - Enormously influential short paper for modern epistemology, analyzing whether "justified true belief" works as a definition of knowledge. While this definition works for most things we know, and has been commonly used historically, Gettier makes a fairly solid case that this definition needs work.
Proof of an External World by G.E. Moore - Moore's famous "here is one hand, and here's another" proof. This includes a long discussion of Kantian epistemology as well, if you're interested in that. I personally don't agree with Kant, but it would be remiss not to include and know him.
Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes - Descartes starts off with a similar "extreme" skepticism. I personally don't think he succeeds in getting out of it, but it's worth noting that Descartes thought he did. This is certainly something worth reading.
If you're willing to shill out some money, I'd also recommend Epistemology by Richard Feldman, which goes over a lot of these topics, and if you want to see something a little more advanced, you might also look at Alvin Plantinga's Warrant: The Current Debate, the first book of his trilogy on epistemology.
And of course, the one I've been recommending to you so far, Thomas Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind.
>How and why is it too exclusive?
You're trying to set up a standard of knowledge that needs to not be based on anything else, but you're also going to doubt everything that's incorrigible. You're standard for knowledge excludes things we know. The problem isn't that we don't know those things, but that your standard is wrong.
This is more of an AcademicPhilosophy-style response, I suspect, but I would suggest checking out:
Metaphysics: An Anthology (Sosa and Kim)
Epistemology: An Anthology (Sosa and Kim)
Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Chalmers)
Philosophy of Language (Martinich)
Actually, a good primer might be Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy
I don't think aphorisms per se are a big part of modern philosophy, so my sense is that philosophers don't worry too much about them directly. But studying heuristics in psychology has been very very hot for a few decades now (see e.g. Heuristics and Biases and Kahneman's work) and a number of philosophers have discussed those. I think it would be uncontroversial to say that aphorisms are fundamentally a sort of heuristic, and the general analysis of heuristics is applicable to aphorisms:
Not precisely the same thing, but possibly relevant: Dennett has written many times about intuition pumps (book, video). He is primarily interested in philosophical hypotheticals, thought experiments, and the like... but some of the analysis of good pumps vs. bad (a.k.a. "boom crutches") seems applicable to good aphorisms vs. bad ones.
>Well, what's your argument for the "maybe not"? Where else would you propose moral intuitions come from?>
I personally wouldn't make any argument for it yet as I'm not informed enough to, but I plan to read a few books on the topic in the coming months. Have you ever checked out this article?
>we probably find a case where your emotional response/moral intuition can be shown to be a bad reference for value judgments. Or would you disagree?>
I wouldn't disagree. But again, I'd like to look a little more into the issue.
>I don't think that's a good thing, but it shows me how my moral intuitions/emotions/empathy doesn't reflect the reality of what's right and wrong because I know the pig is every bit as morally relevant as a dog.>
No, I think you're right actually. I'd probably get extra upset if I read that someone was abusing a white bulldog. And that makes sense, but not a lot of sense.
>Usually when people talk about ethics/morals they're talking about intentional choices to do some sort of good. This is a bit of a tangent, so probably no important. Just thought I'd mention that.>
I was kinda joking about the vultures and rats. I don't think they can be ethical like humans can be. That said, we're learning more about animal cognition all the time and I think we still have a lot more to learn. Have you ever read this article before? That and the other related SEP articles about animals are certainly worth checking out.
>Pulling the lever is what saves more people than simply leaving it, right?>
Right. A lot of people belittle this thought experiment but I think it's fun.
>So you'd argue that the conductor shouldn't save the several people on the tracks at the expense of the one fat guy or whatever?>
Right. And I think you phrased it right by saying shouldn't save. It boils down really to what one thinks about doing vs allowing harm. I think a consequentialist would say the difference between the two isn't morally relevant, right? If so, I understand where the consequentialist is coming from, but I might disagree. Again, I'm giving opinions about things like this when I shouldn't be, not having done my due diligence by reading more into ethics.
>Cute... In a hideous sort of way!>
That's the English Bulldog for ya. The English have a weird sense of humor.
>I haven't really thought about non-cognitivism specifically, but I have thought about moral anti-realism. It seems like non-cognitivism is a subset of that.>
There are some differences. The biggest being that moral anti-realism is a cognitivist metaethical theory and non-cognitivism theories like Emotovism are, obviously, non-cognitivist moral theories. I don't know if you require this, but I'll copy and paste something here for you:
>The cognitivist argues for two claims. The first is that when someone makes a moral claim they are expressing a belief. The second is that moral claims can be true or false; this is part of cognitivism because beliefs are the sort of thing that can be true or false. Philosophers call the potential for a claim to be true or false truth-aptness . Because beliefs are thought to be descriptions, cognitivism is sometimes called descriptivism.>
>Potential misunderstandings • Cognitivism is not the view that moral claims are true, since it is quite coherent for the cognitivist to hold that all moral claims are false (see Chapter 3 ). This is a common mistake and it is best avoided by remembering that cognitivism is a view about truth-aptness and not about truth.>
>Non-cognitivism The non-cognitivist argues that if a person makes a moral claim they are expressing a non-belief state such as an emotion: for example, to say that “killing is wrong” is to express disapproval towards killing. Put crudely, it is as if you are saying “Boo! Killing!” Consequently, because expressions of approval or disapproval are not the sort of things that can be true or false, the non-cognitivist thinks that moral claims are not truth-apt in the way that the cognitivist thinks moral claims are truth-apt.>
>Potential misunderstanding • Non-cognitivism is not the view that moral claims are about our own mental states. For example, it is not the claim that “killing is wrong” really means “I disapprove of killing”. In fact, this would be a form of cognitivism, which asserts that when we make a moral claim we are describing a mental state, in this case my disapproval of killing>
>Error theory in morality derives from three plausible views. The first is cognitivism, the view that moral judgements express beliefs and aim to describe some sector of reality and are consequently truth-apt. The second is non-realism , the view that there are no moral values that correspond to our moral beliefs. The third is that truth involves correspondence to facts. These three views lead to the radical conclusion that moral claims are systematically and uniformly false.>
>Moral error theory is a radical position. It is the view that all these statements are false : • Abducting and torturing children is morally wrong. • Providing famine relief to starving families is morally good. • Locking people in a church and throwing petrol bombs through the window is evil. • It is morally right to save the boy trapped in floodwaters. The error theorist would be quick to remind us that he is not saying that it is right to torture children, bad to give money to charity, wrong to save a boy trapped in floodwaters. For he argues that there is no moral truth at all.>
Moving on now.
>I think there is also factual evidence for morally relevant values. Those values being, as I mentioned before, positive and negative mental experiences.>
I think, but don't quote me on this, that another way of saying this is moral properties can be reduced to natural properties, and by "natural" philosophers mean the subject matter of the natural sciences, which include psychology.
Moral psychology would be an interesting project to look into.
>Here's a little thought experiment: Suppose we lived in a universe with no positive or negative mental experiences. So no suffering, no depriving another of happiness, no ability to be distressed or stressed. All mental experiences (if they existed) would be neutral. Could morality or ethics still exist? You couldn't hurt or help anyone. I'd take the position that it couldn't, there would be no morally relevant way to affect anything.>
I mean, I think that sounds certainly plausible.
>since we naturally will value our own positive/negative mental experiences, if we're being objective we couldn't discount another individual's positive/negative mental experiences. To be consistent, we'd have to value them similarly to our own. To place value on our mental experiences and discount another's, even though the experiences are comparable would be irrational. I don't think that helps with the "should", it just works with a motivation that already exists. There's no traction on people that aren't committed to being rational in the ways I described.>
Right. The only thing to my mind at this point is to say -- one ought to be rational. But I couldn't give you a decisive reason right now why we ought to be rational. As Walt Whitman said defiantly, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." He practically made a (rather benign) ethos out of that statement.
Here's a short list I made a while ago:
/u/LeeHyori's recommendation of Audi and Huemer's anthology is fantastic as well.
Um as long as were into arguments from authority, Hilary Putnam also rejects the is-ought distinction:
https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Value-Dichotomy-Other-Essays/dp/0674013808
So since he's a big important academic philosopher, you should see the position as respectable I guess.