I’m still thinking about it, because the more I think about it, the worse it gets. The more I think about it the more it underlines that this is not what I want in any kind of campaign or movement, let alone a community.
I was trying to say something about logical thinking, but that logical point doesn’t raise its silly head in neutral cases like X and Y and in cases like giving somebody a slap around the face as distinct from breaking their nose. It doesn’t raise its head with that. It does raise its head when you’re talking about rape and pedophilia and possibly nothing else. Therefore, I wanted to make the point that we are rationalists, we are humanists, we are skeptics, we are atheists. Why have we allowed these two topics of rape and pedophilia to deprive us of our normal logical reasoning? We say, “Oh we don’t talk about that, that’s too sensitive.” [emphsis in original]
It does raise its head when you’re talking about rape and pedophilia. Ok, and why would that be? Let’s think about it. It would probably be because they are subjects that are personal to a great many people, and associated with terrible trauma and misery.
So, given that, it’s not very becoming for a prominent intellectual to be so censorious about it. It’s crass and unfeeling, at best, for someone like that to say what amounts to “why do people get so damn worked up about rape??!”
and possibly nothing else. Oh, no, I doubt that very much. Why would that be the case? Why wouldn’t murder, and assault, and war, and mental illness, and disability, and poverty, and injustice, have the same kind of baggage? Poor people don’t much like it when rich people make calm, cool, “rational” generalizations about poverty, in my experience. Why’s that? Because rich people aren’t harmed by poverty in the way poor people are. People who are suffering or who have suffered don’t much like to see people belittling, or even seeming to belittle, their suffering. It’s not a good cause to take up. “Damn it, General, why can’t we talk dispassionate rubbish about the war dead without a lot of widows and orphans making a big fuss?!”
Therefore, I wanted to make the point that we are rationalists, we are humanists, we are skeptics, we are atheists. Yes, yes we are – and why would that mean we aspire to be able to talk and think about rape or pedophilia or genocide without emotion? That’s the last thing I want. I don’t want to stamp out human fears and sympathies. That’s not what humanists should be doing.
Why have we allowed these two topics of rape and pedophilia to deprive us of our normal logical reasoning? We haven’t. Everybody gets the trivial point that “not as bad as” is not the same as “good.” Everybody. We get it. What we don’t get is what the point was of using rape and pedophilia to “provoke” people. The answer to that is not a matter of logic.
Heh. Reminds me of some topical snark at the time: Ought Richard Dawkins be locked in jail? (Thought Experiment)
OMG!! “Ought Richard Dawkins be locked in jail? (Thought Experiment)” is absolutely hilarious!!!
I’ve been reading the backlog on this controversy to try to understand where Dawkins is coming from. I haven’t figured that out, but I am struck by several things.
1. Dawkin’s remarks seem entirely gratuitous. Why is he saying these things? What is his point? What is he trying to accomplish?
2. Dawkins made his career as a scientist, a teacher, and an author. Yet he seems not to have any idea how to communicate or persuade.
Like I said in a previous comment, someone at Pharyngula pointed out that it really isn’t talking about rape and pedophilia that’s the problem, it’s the way it was stated. Would it lead to any less emotional responses and outrage if instead he’d said something like “being killed by a lover is bad, being killed by a stranger is worse, that’s not an endorsement of killing your lover”? Or “dogfights with small dogs are bad, dogfights with big dogs are worse, that’s not an endorsement of dogfights with small dogs”? Or “skinning tabby cats is bad, skinning calico cats is worse, that’s not an endorsement of skinning tabby cats”.
I trust I don’t need to point out that ALL of the above are DEEPLY problematic and would justifiably lead to outrage and emotional comments (oh noes, emotions!), and yet they have nothing to do with rape or pedophilia.
Maybe I should just tweet these and more examples at him, but I doubt he’d even see them.
For many people who are the victims of criminal and non-criminal abuse it is a watershed when they can say to themselves “it could have been worse” or “it’s worse for others”. Not everyone can reach this point.
So, it is perfectly understandable that Dawkin’s comments cause distress, and whilst minimizing people’s suffering (which I don’t think Dawkins does) is quite indecent, I do not think either that it is responsible in public debate (as opposed to private conversation) to shy away from comparisons.
In fact, I think it is the duty of those not affected to be rational and restrained when the victim cannot and a self indulgence to assume a hurt and grief which we ourselves have not suffered – which I think is happening in articles like these.
In the example of murder, every day it seems, some appalling red-top interviews the recently bereaved, quotes their hatred as if it were God’s Truth and calls for revenge in the form of the death penalty. But this is the height of irresponsibility as, I think, is the pretence that injuries should not be compared in public debate.
With the abuse of children the problem is complicated by ubiquity. Practically everyone living was minimised and mistreated to some degree although we in turn minimise that. Not many of us could rely upon being taken seriously and understood for what we were by an important adult in our early lives. (Think of how many children cannot tell their parents they have been hurt for fear of their parents’ anger). We have practically all had ourselves interpreted and explained through jaundiced, adult eyes and throughout history have been beaten, more or less severely, ‘for our own good’. Organised religions make a religion out of this.
So the sexual abuse or extreme physical chastisement of children (only the extreme form will do) – by virtue of being obviously wrong * – becomes the focus of the anger which we cannot accurately locate in our own histories
So whilst the outrage is understandable, I do not think it helps anyone to assume the mantle of the victim in someone else’s crime, which I think is happening here.
* I say ‘obviously’ wrong and trust the reader knows what I mean even though the most extreme of these can be, and frequently are, defended using the same arguments as for milder abuse.
yahweh:
You mean like this?
Why are you still defending this, Dawkins?
Yes, we get it, mild X is not as bad as terribly bad X, and we understand that expressing this is not an endorsement of mild X, but we also understand that looking someone who has lived through what you consider to be mild X in the eye and telling them it wasn’t as bad as terribly bad X is… you know, a bit insensitive. Yes, emotional arguments are bad, but addressing emotionally charged issues at the people who have to deal with those issues in a way which totally disregards the emotional element is not the same as making a reasonable point.
You may not be endorsing mild X when you say that terribly bad X is worse, but you are dismissing it, not completely, not necessarily intentionally, but you’re still telling the people who suffer because of mild X that their suffering is not as relevant as the suffering of those who suffer because of its terribly bad variant.
Suffering is bad, and we need to put a stop to it. Maybe there are times and places when we need to categorise the severity of the causes of suffering, but it is not to the faces of the people who are suffering because of them. Maybe counsellors need those categorisations so they know what to expect with their clients. Surgeons certainly need to know them, but they probably shouldn’t sit down with someone who’s been run over by a bus with a pair of broken legs, point at the person who was set on fire and say, “he’s got it worse than you, you know,” and then, when the response is less than stellar, “pfft, learn how to think!” Sure, in the grand scheme of things, broken legs are less serious than 3rd or 4th degree burns across most of your body, this is entirely true, but that is probably not the time or the place to be making such comparisons, nor the person to make them to.
The only thing that keeps this controversy going, is Dawkins relentlessly insisting on talking about something on which he has absolutely NOTHING to contribute. He doesn’t want to help or enlighten anyone, all he wants to do is hog attention, pretend he’s the final authority, ridicule everyone who doubts him, and make sure he gets the last word, however worthless that word may be.
Yes, we can, and should, have rational conversations about subjects like rape and pedophilia — the purpose of such conversations being, that people know the most about those subjects do the talking, and people less knowledgeable do the listening and learning. If Dawkins can’t understand such a simple and obvious point as this, then including him in ANY conversation is a waste of time and energy.
Whenever I see people like Dr Dawkins doubling down on previous mistakes instead of cutting and running, I am reminded of ‘escalation of commitment’ or ‘sunk cost fallacy’ biases. The classic throwing good money after bad fallacy that keeps people re-investing in money sinks. Instead of reevaluating, admitting error and moving on. We keep trying to justify the previous error until it completely destroys good will earned over a lifetime.
So whilst the outrage is understandable, I do not think it helps anyone to assume the mantle of the victim in someone else’s crime, which I think is happening here.
You really don’t know who on the thread has been assaulted, raped or molested and I advise you not to guess.
This is very disturbing, and it has been going on so long that it illustrates, I believe, something that is deeply amiss with assumptions made by too many new atheists. It is related to the underlying scientism, which has almost become a dogma of the new atheism. It is a failure to take account of an entire dimension of being human, what Wilfred Sellars has called the “manifest image” (vs the “scientific image” of the scientific outlook), or what might be called the image of the human, which is not just rational-scientific, but emotional, ambiguous, uncertain, hesitant, multi-faceted, relational, personal, etc., and that these things have a logic of their own, and cannot simply be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationality.
Eliding this aspect of being human ignores the fact that each of us has a point of view, looks at the world with a personal perspective, and that rationality must take account of this. This is something that Dawkins (but not only Dawkins) seems unable to recognise. He does not see his view as a point of view, and therefore he seems unable to recognise that others see his going on about this as irrational, almost (to my mind) as a case of arrested development. I know people who have suffered what Dawkins would call “mild sexual abuse”, and have been so traumatised by it that for some time afterwards they have been unable to cope with life, and have become deeply depressed. How dare he suggest that “date rape” is worse than other kinds of rape, when “milder” forms of abuse can be traumatising and disorienting?! The fact that Dawkins keeps bringing up his own experience of childhood abuse suggests that this has more emotional significance for him than he is ready to acknowledge, and is trying to minimise its effect by comparing it with abuse that is somehow “more” abusive. But being masturbated (notice how Dawkins’ uses the trivialising word ‘diddled’ in this connexion) by a trusted adult is not a minor act of abuse, as Dawkins himself seems to realise (otherwise he’d stop repeating it). Anal rape would have been a more terrible act of abuse, he suggests. Well, perhaps, but would it have compromised trust any more than the “mild” abuse that he suffered? And what would he have said had his trusted teacher performed an act of fellatio? More serious than masturbation, less serious than anal rape? Perhaps if he thought about things this way he would realise that what counts here is perspective, and that, since the memory has stayed with him so long, he was likely affected (at the time) much more deeply by this act than he seems to think.
It is related to the underlying scientism, which has almost become a dogma of the new atheism.
Sounds like another tiresome reiteration of an old stereotype of atheists — and while it may apply to Dawkins and a significant number of his followers, it does not necessarily apply to “new atheists” in general.
It is a failure to take account of an entire dimension of being human, what ilfred Sellars has called the “manifest image” (vs the “scientific image” of the scientific outlook), or what might be called the image of the human, which is not just rational-scientific, but emotional, ambiguous, uncertain, hesitant, multi-faceted, relational, personal, etc., and that these things have a logic of their own, and cannot simply be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationality.
Actually, yes, all of that can be “subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationality” — it just has to be done by wiser and more honest people than Dawkins.
Raging Bee….. Is that what it sounds like? Good, because that was intentional. As for its being a stereotype, since you think the manifest image can be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationality, then you don’t understand Sellar’s point, about the scientific and manifest images. The problem is that too many atheists, just like you, go off at the mouth (or the finger tips) without knowing what they are talking about. Read Sellar’s paper and then come back and say what you think, because, as it is, you’re stereotyping yourself! Good caricature, to be sure!
I haven’t read Sellars’s paper, but I do agree with Eric that scientific rationality doesn’t get at everything. That’s what I’ve been saying throughout this disagreement.
Maybe it could in principle. Maybe you could put people in fMRIs and find out what made certain areas of their brains light up and get some kind of understanding of how discussions of rape made them feel…but it would be just one kind of understanding, and sympathetic understanding of people and their feelings needs more than that one kind.
Every single subjective thing which we each experience is created by our brain and can therefore be understood and explained scientifically. This doesn’t mean that humanity will ever necessarily achieve this understanding, but in principle, like Ophelia said above, I think science could eventually describe in complete detail what it feels like to be a unique individual, say Dr. Dawkins. Indeed I think this is a highly desirable outcome, and something to strive towards in neuroscience. Just think of how our relationships would evolve if it was possible to understand an acquaintance at that level. Right now, empathy requires imagining how we would feel in someone else’s shoes; it would be a heck of a lot easier (especially for some people) to care about others if we didn’t have to imagine anymore. Adding to our knowledge of the human experience and resulting behavior is a good thing because it has the potential to increase understanding and lessen hatred. But subsuming subjectivity under science does not take away the legitimacy of fields that explore it in other ways (like the arts). Just because you can explain why you like a painting and your friend doesn’t using neuroscience doesn’t mean you are making art itself less relevant.
People run into problems when they take their own understanding and experience of the world and assume it applies across the board; it’s even worse when they claim they have “science” or “logic” on their side. So criticise Dawkins as much as you want, he’s being irrational and letting his own biases get in the way of clarity on this subject. But don’t think we all share his short-sightedness. Most of us are well aware that we have unconscious biases and predilections, influences on our behavior and thoughts that we cannot ourselves see. And most of us know that while we strive for rationality, we often miss the mark.
No, wait, that’s not what I said; it’s pretty much the reverse of what I said. I said maybe one could in principle put people in fMRIs and find out what made certain areas of their brains light up and get some kind of understanding of how discussions of rape made them feel…but it would be just one kind of understanding, and sympathetic understanding of people and their feelings needs more than that one kind.
I don’t think science could even in principle “describe in complete detail what it feels like to be a unique individual.”
Ophelia @14–
Aside from the fact that “scientific rationality doesn’t get at everything,” Dawkins appears to understand social science research about as well as creationists who claim there are no transitional fossils understand paleontology. The difficulties of even defining his terms are huge. (Bad? Worse? On what scale? Or multiple scales, and if so what?) Then, how do you go about pulling a representative sample of victims for a notoriously under-reported crime? And what does he mean by “date?” If you talk to a stranger in a bar, which category is that?
Back when I used to give statistical and computer help to social science grad students, Dawkin’s “hypothesis” would have gotten the reaction, “You know, Richard, I think you’d better go back to your committee. There’s nothing here quantifiable enough to test.” (And if his present behavior is any indication, his response would have been, “Poor me, I couldn’t even talk about rape without that woman getting all emotional! She refused to run it through the computer!”)
I’m kind of with Eric MacDonald @11. I suspect Dawkins needs to go back and consider whether that “mild” pedophilia left some unexamined issues he needs to address.
Raging Bee….. Is that what it sounds like? Good, because that was intentional.
So you intentionally engaged in bogus stereotyping? Your dishonesty is noted.
…since you think the manifest image can be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationality…
What the hell is a “manifest image?” That sounds like one of those purely abstract concepts theologians use to pretend they’re on to something, but which soon turn out, under closer examination, to be utterly meaningless fuzzwords.
The problem is that too many atheists, just like you, go off at the mouth (or the finger tips) without knowing what they are talking about.
First, how do you know I’m an atheist? I bet I believe in far more gods than you do. And second, like too many religious apologists, you’re lazily calling me ignorant without showing where I’m wrong.
Read Sellar’s paper and then come back and say what you think…
If you’ve read it, why don’t you explain why it’s right, instead of just demanding we do your research for you? It sounds like you’re bluffing here — especially since you don’t provide any links to the paper you’re demanding we read.
I said maybe one could in principle put people in fMRIs and find out what made certain areas of their brains light up and get some kind of understanding of how discussions of rape made them feel…
Yes, one could, and it would help a little; but that’s not what I meant. I meant that rational inquiry (on whatever scale, from big-budget science to ordinary people trying to understand each other) could listen to and account for non-rational human factors along with other observable and quantifiable facts, and draw more useful conclusions by accommodating all the messy, complex and contradictory facts of human life, not just the ones that fit neatly into a simple pretty picture.
Raging Bee – hang on. You’re talking to more than one person in that comment, so you need to mark each one. Your last quote is from my comment while your others are from Eric’s. My comment was in reply to chris devries, not to you, and I was addressing what chris said about what science could do. Science, not rational inquiry. The two are not identical; not all rational inquiry is scientific.
Raging Bee, you misunderstand my point. That’s what it sounds like, and was meant to, but I deny it is a bogus stereotype, as you so aptly demonstrate in your reply.
As for Sellar’s paper. You have google and a thousand and one other search engines. I shouldn’t take you long to find it. However, if you are technologically challenged, here’s a link: http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/SellarsPhilSciImage.pdf
I’m afraid your huffing and puffing is precisely what I meant by going off at the mouth (or at the finger tips) … You said that the manifest image could be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationality, and then ask what it is?! See what I mean? What is wrong with a lot of the new atheism, I’m afraid, is precisely this kind of uninformed huffing and puffing, the very same kind of thing that Dawkins has indulged in for ages regarding women’s concerns, from “elevatorgate” and his “Dear Muslima” response up to his overkill regarding “mild” and “serious” sexual abuse.
By the way, I took it for granted that anyone who has an interest in the scope of science and reason would have had at least a glancing acquaintance with Wilfred Sellar’s paper “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” as you seemed in your very quick response to do. Who am I to do your reading for you? As Ophelia says, “not all rational inquiry is scientific,” as the existence of mathematics and logic should be enough to confirm. But Sellars shows how the scientific image of man is a deliberate abstraction from many of the features that are common in our experience. Indeed, science does its best to eliminate everything that is distinctive about being human, such as freedom, consciousness, value, intentionality, and so on.
But then, of course, the scientific atheist will try to convince us that we should not believe in gods, which immediately introduces questions of intentionality and choice. Dawkins, for instance, tries to say how unreasonable for people to consider “minor” sexual abuse as “serious,” and fails to recognise that while it is true that aggravated sexual assault seems to most of us much more serious that some creepy teacher “diddling” with Dawkins’ penis, nevertheless, for the person whose trust is betrayed in the latter way, such a “minor” occurrence may have very serious personal problems later in life, so is it so unserious after all? And how does he make this distinction (viz., between serious and unserious) if he, along with other prominent new atheists, denies human freedom and intentionality, or thinks that consciousness, the self, and the unity of experience are illusions? Besides, Dawkins thinks that teaching a child religion is a serious form of abuse. He really needs to get his ideas in sync a bit better.
A few comments:
1.
I believe I do need to point out to Gen that her/his analogies are hopelessly inadecuate:
The argument is valid, of course, but only because the logic is messed up: the premises bear no relation to the conclusion. I can provide many more examples of similar arguments, such as:
Being slightly shortsighted is bad, being very shortsighted is worse, that’s not an endorsement of stealing spectacles
But maybe Gen is suggesting that “being killed” is as bad as “killing”. In that case, I’ll have to ponder that deepity further.
Absurd. Dawkins did not compare different “kinds” or “races” of women in his tweets. Maybe Gen meant something like “being mauled by a tabby cat is bad, being mauled by a calico cat is worse”, but this version too is patently absurd.
This argument, like the previous ones, is obviously valid, and additionally the premises have a good chance of being true. I suspect chihuahuas can’t really do too much damage to each other, hence a fight between them might well be less gruesome than one between pitbulls. But even if I’m wrong, the argument is still valid: if we accept the premises, we must accept the conclusion: A ^ B => ~(~A).
Of course, we could conclude that we cannot ascertain whether the chihuahuas suffered more or less than the pitbulls, and hence that no conclusion is possible because no consistent formulation of the premises is possible. We can do that, at a price: that of accepting the impossibility of rational thought concerning subjective experiences. And from there to solipsism there’s but a small step, one which I trust people participating in this discussion would shun.
2.
John Morales, in his reply to yahweh, falls into the tu quoque fallacy in what I can only describe as pristine fashion: not the slightest speck of logic mars its rare perfection.
3.
Athywren said:
Er… yes. By definition, “mild” means mild. If something causes you great suffering, you wouldn’t call it “mild”. You could have taken issue with Dawkins’s use of “mild” as universally valid for all people who go through his same experience, but I don’t think Dawkins ever said that. In fact, it is obvious that no two people can have exactly the same experience. Not even the same person can have the same experience twice. But it is equally obvious that for each person there is some experience which they’d call “mild sexual abuse”. The problem is that unless we have a universal standard, no progress can be made at all: if every experience can be “traumatic” to someone at some time, there would be no justice. In order to live in society, we simply must accept that most people react in similar ways to similar experiences, and that there are bound to be imperfections, just as there can never be a “one size fits all” bus seat. If someone should say “I think bus seats are OK”, am I entitled to take offence because I find them far too small? It depends: if I am 8-ft tall, certainly not: it would be silly to expect everybody else to cater for my unusual size. If I am 6-ft tall, I’d say yes. Where should the line be drawn? That’s a hard question, of course, but we must answer it somehow. Not perfectly, because that would be impossible, but not stupidly either.
There are people who suffer because of Dawkins’s tweets. I sympathise, of course. The purpose of all human action should be the reduction of suffering as much as possible. But where do we draw the line? I would have joined the protest if Dawkins had said something like “your suffering does not count”. He did not: he said he was the victim of mild sexual abuse. He. Himself. I was the victim of mild sexual abuse too. It was mild for me, and for my teammates who were victims too. How do I know? Because they told me: how else can we know? How do I know my experience was “mild”? Because I rarely recall it, because I’ve told my friends and family and we’ve laughed about it, because the perpetrator had no authority over me, and so on. Do I need to justify my subjective interpretation of that experience? Apparently I do, because some commenters… coming right up.
4.
Eric MacDonald said:
I trust I’m not being unfair when I say that this pretentious string of drivel is the apex of arrogance. What makes Eric MacDonald think he knows more than Dawkins himself about Dawkins’s subjective experience? Can anybody imagine the reaction if Dawkins were to say “some women think their experience was mild, but in fact it wasn’t”? (Though it would probably be minor compared to the reaction if he were to say “some women think their experience was traumatic, but in fact it was mild”).
5.
Ophelia said:
That’s tantamount to saying that “to feel like a particular individual” is a phenomenon that takes place in the physical universe but is nevertheless not knowable, even in principle. Which implies that reality is, in principle, unknowable. Unless the statement “it is possible completely to describe what it is like to be a particular individual” is shown to contain or imply a contradiction, I don’t see on what grounds can that scepticism be sustained.
No, it really isn’t. “What it feels like to be a unique individual” isn’t what science does.
Nothing can describe that completely, but it’s not what science does at all.
Also – not knowable is not the same as not knowable by science. Not everything is knowable by science.
Piero @21:
<snicker>
I made no argument there, so it can hardly have been an informal logical fallacy.
(But it’s nice to see you implicitly concede that what I quoted is an example of what yahweh deplores)
OK, John. I’ll accept that your subjective experience when writing that post did not register in your conscious mind as being the same as the experience of putting forward an argument. Which, I must say, speaks well for your conscious mind.
Ophelia, I’m curious about the possibility of non-scientific knowledge. What do you have in mind?
[OT + meta]
piero @25, tell me more about this purported argument you imagine I subconsciously employed.
(I’m not unfamiliar with symbolic logic, so don’t hold back)
That’s a big subject, Piero. Maybe you should look into it.
There’s knowing-how, for instance.
Oh, no, John! I wouldn’t dare tell you what the contents of your subconscious mind are; for that you’d have to ask Eric Mac Donald. I can, however, reveal part of the contents of my conscious mind when I read your post. It is rather involved, as is usually the case when we try to explain the obvious, but bear with me.
Context: discussion on Dawkins’s tweets and successive statements. Consensus seems to be that Dawkins was guilty of gross misconduct and lack of empathy. Most posters are angry at Dawkins’s callousness. John Morales, in the first post of the thread, links to a piece entitled Ought Richard Dawkins be locked in jail? (Thought Experiment) which could be described as a satirical take-down. Blanche Quizno comments that the linked piece was “hilarious”. John Morales does not reply to Blanche.
Conclusion 1: John Morales disapproves of Dawkins’s behaviour.
yahweh says that wearing the mantle of the victim in someone else’s crime is not beneficial to anyone. John Morales replies by quoting yahweh’s remark and adds a new quote, this time from one of Dawkins’s articles, preceded by the question “you mean like this?”.
Possibility 1: John genuinely wants to know whether the quote exemplifies the phenomenon described by yahweh, in order to have a confirmation of his interpretation.
Possibility 2: the question is rhetorical, and its real meaning is “Dawkins is guilty of precisely the behaviour you are criticising in us, so your criticism smacks of hipocrisy”
Possibility 1 is ruled out by common sense.
Conclusion 2: John Morales quoted yahweh in order to highlight the confict between his criticism and statements made by Dawkins himself.
Ergo, John’s comment is equivalent to this argument:
Your criticism is invalid, because Dawkins does it too.
QED
John Morales:
I did no such thing. You certainly interpreted the quote that way. Whether rightly or wrongly is immaterial: the structure of your argument is fallacious anyway.
FWIW, I think the quote you chose is not an example of the behaviour described by yahweh. But that’s a different discussion.
[OT]
piero @29, I appreciate your elaboration of your speculative conceit, but I note that (a) you have not exhausted the universe of possibility (e.g. Possibility 3: that yahweh’s grievance is misapplied rather than that it’s invalid; Possibility 4: that yahweh’s grievance is valid but not applicable to either party; etc) and (b) your made your determination on the basis of your “common sense” exclusion of all but one of your (severely limited) enumeration of possibilities.
Amusingly, none of this hides that you really do think that what I quoted is an example of yawheh’s grievance, which means that you are ironically in the same position as that which you impute to me.
(The acquisition of knowledge based on scientific reasoning for can be tricky, no? 😉 )
Piero: “I trust I’m not being unfair when I say that this pretentious string of drivel is the apex of arrogance.”
Yes you are. All I said was that Dawkins’ repeating this time and time again suggests (notice the word) that this episode was more emotionally traumatic than he seems to think. Perhaps not. I do not claim to know Dawkins better than he knows himself, and he hasn’t commented here. So, suggestion still has substance, I think. and is neither drivel nor “the apex of arrogance,” though I suggest that your own point of view is arrogant and clearly unable to detect nuance — which is amply demonstrated by the rest of your comment, which is a bit heavy on overstatement.
As for suggesting that “Being killed by a lover is bad, being killed by a stranger is worse, that’s not an endorsement of killing your lover” is a valid argument, just try to put that in symbolic form (since you know all about it) and then tell me, please, wherein the validity lies. You clearly need another premise to draw the conclusion, such as “Calling something bad, and something else worse, is not a endorsement of either.” (Sometimes, actually, it may be, when you must choose, and sometimes can only choose the lesser of two evils. Which only goes to show that the “argument” is not valid.)
In fact, Ophelia’s statement that a full description of what it feels like to be a unique individual cannot, even in principle, be scientific, shows how quickly you make mistakes in logic, since you have already contradicted the claim that you make in response. Your response that this is something that “takes place in the physical world” (and therefore, presumably, is accessible to science) is one of the matters at issue. Do mental events take place in the physical world? No one that I know has yet shown that they are. You even suggest as much by saying that I could not possibly know about Dawkins’ subjective experience, and that pretending that I do (which I don’t, of course) is, to use your inflated jargon, “the apex of arrogance.”
John, I really have no interest in engaging in a war of words with you. For the record, I was not being conceited: I merely put into words the process of interpretation that anyone, including yourself, would go through on reading your post. I did this because you asked me to.
And you are right: none of that hides that I think the quote constitutes an apposite example. In fact nothing at all could hide it, because that thought does not exist. As I said, that would constitute a whole new discussion, one which I’d rather not enter into, because I do not expect it to be fruitful.
Cross posted. Piero, you say to John: “John, I really have no interest in engaging in a war of words with you.” Really? Your belligerent attitude in argumentation suggests otherwise, and the fact that your argumentation is slipshod, and your grasp of logic elementary, doesn’t seem to have dawned on you.
Eric:
Thank you for your heated response.
So, when Dawkins “suggests” he is wrong, but when you “suggest” you might be wrong. That’s quite a nuance.
The validity of the argument can be shown using predicate logic, but I won’t spend hours doing it. In the other cases it was simpler, because the conclusion is a double negation of one of the premises; in the case at hand, the conclusion is wholly independent of the premises, hence predicate logic is called for. It’s easy to see, however, that the argument is valid if we put it in this form:
stealing apples is bad
stealing oranges is worse
none of the above implies that giving away your bananas is good
Ii’s not at issue at all, unless you have a proof that mental phenomena occur in a different place. Just as there is no evidence for god (whatever that means), there is no evidence for the existence of such a separate realm (whatever that means). Until evidence is forthcoming, it is rational to assume it does not exist, and hence to treat mental processes as physical ones.
So you’ve never been drunk? Have you never met an Alzheimer patient? People with brain damage? Nothing at all that could constitute evidence for the physical nature of mental phenomena? Weird, that. I’ll tell you what: after you die, why don’t you tell me about the marvels of disembodied thought?
Finally, yes. There is nothing you can know about Dawkins’s subjective experience. A neuroscientist could carry out some tests that would reveal to him/her some of that subjectivity-but you, personally, are not a neurocientist and have never carried out such tests on Dawkins.
Eric:
As I said to John before, I have no interest in engaging in a war of words with you. Your last post was merely a “fuck you!” with frills. When discussions degenerate into pure displays of emotion, it’s time to call it quits.
Piero, it is obvious that you cannot discuss without being offensive. My last comment was not, as you so inelegantly put it, a “fuck you” with frills. It was substantive, and it answered points that you tried to make. Obviously, given your penchant for pointless “argumentation”, it is indeed time to call it quits.
By the way, Piero, the fact that mental events and brain events are related does not show that brain events and mental events are identical. As for knowing things about people’s subjective experience, we can know a lot. I can know, for example, that someone is experiencing anger, frustration, elation, etc., and what people say often suggests something about their personal experience, even if it does not amount to knowledge. If you keep apologising for something you have done, even though I keep assuring you that everything’s fine by me, I know pretty definitely that you feel both guilty and embarrassed. All I said was that Dawkins’ harping on about his experience of “mild” sexual abuse as a boy, suggests (to me, at least), that this experience had a greater effect on him than he realises. I may be wrong, but that is what it suggests to me; The fact that this elementary point eludes you leads me to wonder why you consider me arrogant. As for the validity of the argument (in question), I have given reason for supposing that, as it stands, it may or may not be valid, depending on the circumstances, which is why you need another premise to make it a valid formal argument. As I say, your inability to fathom some fairly shallow points makes it clear that this discussion can go nowhere.
Eric:
OK, let’s see:
Whether I refute this assertion or accept it, no contribution to the discussion would arise. My attitude and my argumentation are separate things. In what way is your claim substantive, then?
You cannot call my argumentation “slipshod” unless you show it to be so. Logic is not a shouting game. The rest is merely an insult, and does not really deserve a reply. I’ll just say that it was kind of funny.
As you see, your post had no substance whatsoever. I’ll take the trouble to list all the substantive issues you (and everybody else) did not address (or have not yet addressed, to be fair):
1. The argument that subjective factors render the ranking of trauma impossible could be extended indefinitely to encompass almost any kind of human behaviour. How is social cohesion to be maintained in such a cognitive environment?
2. You did not criticise Gen’s analogies, even though they were palinly silly. Was it just because s/he agreed with the rest in condemning Dawkins? Is that the right attitude to have when faced with complex psychological, social and cognitive issues? Is it conducive to an improvement in anybody’s condition?
3. You did not address my pointing out that your usage of “suggest” was inconsistent.
4. You did not address my explanation of the validity of Gen’s argument.
5. You did not address my pointing out your confusion between “science can know” and “Eric can know”.
Discussions must have an interesting purpose. Calling people names is boring, because anybody can do it. When I asked Ophelia for an example of non-scientific knowledge, she did not say “GFY!” or words to that effect: instead she gave me one. I’m thinking about the example she provided. That’s useful to me, because it makes me question my assumptions and subject them to critical analysis from the point of view of somebody else. Whether I’ll end up agreeing or disagreeing is immaterial: what counts is the process.
Discussing with you, on the other hand, is useless to both of us. I’m not learning anything from you (no offence: that’s merely a fact) and you are too obfuscated to learn anything from me. That’s why it’s time to call it quits.
piero @ 33 – for the record, John wasn’t calling you conceited @ 31. His use of the word in the phrase “piero @29, I appreciate your elaboration of your speculative conceit” was the other meaning – a conceit is an idea, a conception, in poetry a bit of verbal display. Shakespeare and his contemporaries use it in that sense extensively.
If you continue this discussion you need to be a good deal more civil to Eric. To everyone, but you’ve been particularly rude to Eric here.
Ophelia:
Thank you for the explanation.
I’m sorry, but I really, honestly cannot see my exchange with Eric as rude on my part:
“The fact that this elementary point eludes you …”
“Your belligerent attitude in argumentation suggests otherwise, and the fact that your argumentation is slipshod, and your grasp of logic elementary, doesn’t seem to have dawned on you.”
“given your penchant for pointless “argumentation”,
“your inability to fathom some fairly shallow points”
These are all quotes from Eric’s posts. Where have I done anything remotely similar?
piero – I don’t need to look any farther than your first comment on this post. You were rude to Eric in your very first sentence addressed to him.
If you can’t even figure that out you shouldn’t be commenting here at all.
Oh, yes. I saw it now. I apologise to both Eric and you.
Thank you.
Piero, thank you. I accept you apology.
But let me make a few points regarding your last comment. When I called your argumentation slipshod I was referring directly to your claim that Gen’s argument was a valid one. It isn’t. Indeed, it’s not even a valid analogy in relation to the difference between relatively minor abuse (all things considered) and more serious abuse, if that’s what you meant by calling it valid. Saying that “the logic is messed up” doesn’t really help, does it? However, to go back to Gen’s analogy, there are occasions when calling something bad, and calling another thing worse, would mean that you should do the bad thing, and not the worse one, where a decision must be made, and those are the only options open to you. So you need another premise to make the “argument” valid. That was my point. The question you left open was what your word ‘valid’ referred to. You did not make this clear, and you did not refer to Gen’s analogy at this point.
Second, I fail to see how my use of ‘suggest’ was inconsistent. I merely said that Dawkins’ repeated use of his experience of abuse in his overkill regarding less serious and more serious (the point of which, as Ophelia says, we got long ago, but which, continued endlessly begins to imply that the less serious is not really serious at all, and I am saying that the example he uses is not a good one, because, if it didn’t bother him to be masturbated by a trusted teacher, I can think of some people who might have been traumatised by it) — anyway, Dawkins’ overkill suggests (to me, and, if I remember rightly, to someone above as well) that Dawkins’ childhood experience was perhaps more serious than he lets on. It certainly seems to be a vivid memory. But of course, only Dawkins knows, and I would expect him to deny it anyway. But I don’t know. I was just reflecting on the fact that he has repeated this for a few years now, and does so in his book The God Delusion, as I recall (although I stand to be corrected on that).
Third, I do not see that I made a connexion between “Science can know” and “Eric [I] can know”. Science does not, as a rule, deal with personal experiences, because personal experiences are based (as Wittgenstein might have said) on no evidence, that is no objectively checkable evidence. They are personal and to that extent private, though there are some things that I can know about your experiences just by your response. If you are hit by a golf ball and cry out, then I expect you are both surprised and hurt (in pain). There are all sorts of things that can be known about personal experiences of others just be observing their behaviour, their facial expressions, etc., but there are some things that you may never know, and certainly will not be known by science. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging may show blood flow patterns in the brain, but they cannot show (and are not identical with) personal experiences. So, I don’t see where you think I have confused things.
Last, I have not called you names, although you started out … well, that’s in the past now, isn’t it? I have tried to point out as clearly as I can where I think you have gone wrong. I’m not known for brevity, but I don’t think what I have written is without content or without point, as I have just tried to explain.
[meta + OT]
piero @33, FWIW, it really was just a question seeking additional information.
And, though I accept your personal answer to it is “no”, the only way it could have been a tu quoque was if the answer was “yes”, which means you thought it at least plausible that others might think that.
Eric:
Thank you for accepting my apology.
My take on Gen’s analogy was purely formal. Additional premises would indeed be necessary for a semantic analysis, but my criticism did not involve the ethical implications, only the formal ones. Gen claimed that his/her example was “deeply problematic”, which it is not, as stated. In other words, he/she claimed that the example could/should be discarded, but in fact it was a valid argument, hence useless as an example of “deeply problematic” arguments. And even if the argument had been worded in the intended form it would still be valid:
The above is the argument Gen probably had in mind. If we assume that “to endorse” means “to regard as good”, then the argument is obviously valid, and takes the same elementary form as the rest: A ^ B => ~(~A): where A is the statement “Being killed by your lover is bad”: if it is true that being killed by your lover is bad, then it is true that it is not the case that being killed by your lover is not bad.
The whole dispute hinges on the second, or B, premise. Is it reasonable to accept “Being killed by a stranger is worse” as true? But the truth-value of B is irrelevant to the validity of the argument. Validity is not the same as soundness: validity depends only on formal structure, not meaning: “Green ideas sleep furiously, purple ideas sleep more furiously; that’s not saying that green ideas sleep peacefully” is a valid argument, even if it bears no relation to reality.
The first premise is, in all the problematic cases, obviously true, at least for decent people. So, the real issue is whether the second premise in these arguments is true or false. In the case of Dawkins’s remarks, that premise is “violent rape is worse”. But at this point we should remind ourselves how this neverending dispute started: Dawkins described an experience he had as “mild sexual abuse,” and that was regarded as dismissive of other people’s suffering.
What bothers me about this criticism is its incosistency: Dawkins’s statement was criticised on the grounds that he could not possibly know how other people would have felt in the same circumstances, because only the victim can know. But Dawkins was talking about his experience: so the criticism amounts to “Dawkins does not know how Dawkins felt in those circumstances”, a statement which you echoed in one of your posts.
Subjective experiences are, of course, unknowable by anyone except the subject, at least at this point in time. I don’t think they will remain so forever, but that’s immaterial: in the case at hand, what counts is that it is indeed true that only the victim of sexual abuse can possibly know what it was like. But experiences are not inconmensurable: if they were, we would have no means of communicating anything to anyone. When someone is sad, I recognize that experience, and I behave as if it was similar to mine. This works well most of the time. Why? Because it is plausible that, since human brains are morphologically similar to each other, the range of states they can be in is also similar. Hence, even if Dawkins were to say “genital fondling is mild sexual abuse” (which he did not), the statement would be true at least for some subset of people.
Then Dawkins was accused of being insensitive, because in order to make a point of logic he used examples that many people would find offensive. That many people are offended by them is indeed true. The problem is whether we should or should not refrain from saying things some people will find offensive. I’d say yes, we should, unless we have a very good reason not to; then the problem becomes that of establishing whether Dawkins had a very good reason, and the criteria used to evaluate that reason. Those are murky waters, so I’ll just say that I believe we can all agree that offending people gratuitously is bad, and that I don’t think Dawkins set out gratuitously to offend. But the reaction to his statements was, in my opinion, uncharitable in this respect.
In conclusion (and I promise not to address this issue again in my life), I’ve learnt the following:
– Never mention a sensitive subject unless you can do so in a compassionate manner. This is a good lesson to learn, and I thank those commenters that made me realise it.
– Never offend anyone unless the benefits outweigh the suffering of the offended. That’s also a good lesson.
– When determining whether a statement could cause offence, go with the lowest denominator.
– Never assume that “rational” is the same as “progressive.”
– Never assume that “progressive” is the same as “rational.”
– Never enter discussions on women’s issues.
Cheers to all
John:
Exactly.
You said that the manifest image could be subsumed under the rubric of scientific rationality, and then ask what it is?!
I did not say any such thing about this “manifest image” you speak of. I merely asked you to define this abstraction. And you have still failed to define it.
What is wrong with a lot of the new atheism, I’m afraid, is precisely this kind of uninformed huffing and puffing, the very same kind of thing that Dawkins has indulged in for ages regarding women’s concerns, from “elevatorgate” and his “Dear Muslima” response up to his overkill regarding “mild” and “serious” sexual abuse.
You fail to acknowledge the vigorous response by many other new atheists — including Ophelia and other FTBers — debunking and repudiating the ignorance of which you rightly complain. That’s probably because Dawkins fits your stereotype of atheists, and his critics don’t.
Who am I to do your reading for you?
Excuse me, but you’re the one making claims about this paper; so you’re the one whose job it is to back up your claims. I’m not asking you to do our reading for us, I’m asking YOU to do YOUR reading for YOU.
Besides, Dawkins thinks that teaching a child religion is a serious form of abuse. He really needs to get his ideas in sync a bit better.
Here, he has a point: some forms of religious indoctrination really do have observable effects consistent with abuse — i.e., teaching kids to hate some part of themselves they can’t change, or threatening them with eternal torture in a fictitious Hell.
Do mental events take place in the physical world? No one that I know has yet shown that they are.
Has anyone shown you where else they COULD take place?
Raging Bee….
You say that you did not say “the manifest image can be subsumed under scientific rationality.” But what you say amounted to this. First, you quote from my comment, and then you respond:
The italics constitutes the quote, the rest is your response in which you say that what Sellars calls the manifest image can be subsumed under scientific rationality. So, yes that is what you said. I’m not sure what you mean by suggesting that Dawkins is neither wise nor honest, since the question of Dawkins honesty or wisdom is irrelevant to the point you seem to be trying to make.
When I spoke about huffing and puffing, I wasn’t only talking about what Dawkins said, but about the very cavalier way that new atheists talk about positions they are opposed to, which I think of as huffing and puffing. When new atheists, like Sam Harris, speak of the “illusion” of free will, for example, it is not clear that he has shown free will to be an illusion, but, rather than explore the philosophical literature, and respond to the arguments posed there, he seems content to reference Libet (for one), and suggest that Libet shows that the brain makes a “decision” before the “person” does. But he has yet to show that the blood flow to the brain indicates that a “decision” has been made, or what it means to suggest that the “decision” was made before the “person” makes the decision. Harris was trained in philosophy, but does not pay much attention to it now that he thinks that cognitive science will provide answers to all philosophical questions (which I doubt very much is true).
The same goes for Harris’s fast and loose way with relating science and morality, but fails to notice that he doesn’t derive morality from science, but uses an elided value premise regarding human flourishing (which is itself not a scientific conclusion). Harris is a utilitarian of the Benthamite variety, and his position suffers from the shortcomings of this position. Besides, saying that he doesn’t bother with metaethics because he finds it boring is a surefire way of making mistakes, when talking about morality., My point about huffing and puffing here is that (in my view) too many new atheists allow fairly elementary attempts at philosophy to pass as in some sense new and informative. As is your claim that the manifest image can be subsumed under scientific rationality. I do not include Ophelia in that number, by the way. Though she claims not to be a philosopher, she regularly shows the smarts to know when philosophical issues are at stake.
As to doing your reading for you. I gave a brief synopsis of the idea of manifest image in my comment. If you wanted to know more, reading the original source would be best. I gave as much detail as I thought necessary in an online comment.
As to religion and abuse. Yes, some religious indoctrination can be very abusive. No question. My point was simply to say that if Dawkins wants to go on about abuse in the way that he does he has to be more careful. What he thinks of as minor — for example, a woman alone being propositioned in an elevator by a strange man — is not, and should not be considered to be minor unless it is minor for the person concerned. Dawkins responded on this occasion with mockery. And that is effectively what he is doing when he speaks of “minor” sexual abuse as opposed to “serious” sexual abuse. I know women who have been traumatised by what Dawkins is calling “minor” sexual abuse, and I am suggesting that what Dawkins teacher did to him was not minor. Some religious indoctrination is abusive, whereas some ways of inducting children into religious belief and practice is not.
As for mental events. No, I’m not sure where they take place, which is part of the mystery of consciousness. Some philosophers (and cognitive scientists) have identified brain events and mental states, but there are difficulties in doing so, since mental states are characterised by intentionality (aboutness), but physical states by themselves are not. So, it is not clear what consciousness is, or how it is related to brain states. Philosophy of Mind is a very interesting, but also very complex area of study, and cognitive science (such as it is) has not answered all the questions or settled all the difficulties.
I used to be a supporter of the new atheism, until it became clear that much of it was firmly allied to the claim that scientific knowledge comprises all the knowledge that there is. You seemed to make the same claim. I think the claim is empty huffing and puffing, as I said. It has not been established, and indeed there seem to be hosts of things that we can know that cannot be included easily under the general rubric of science. And when the addition is made “science, broadly construed”, and the limits of the construal are not specified, we know that something has gone wrong somewhere. I know, the laudable aim of this is to exclude religious knowledge, but, if that is its purpose, there are better ways of doing this than simply using the word ‘science’ as a good housekeeping seal of approval.
Eric:
I could not disagree more. I was not going to comment on your post simply because it is off-topic and because my reply risks being far too long and boring. But my emotions compel me to. I’ll try to be as concise as possible.
1.
Harris does not “fail to notice that he doesn’t derive morality from science,” Indeed, he has stated numerous times that, in order to make any meaningful statement about anything whatsoever, we must accept some assumptions. Without those assumptions no knowledge, including ethical knowledge, is conceivable. For example, we agree that, for any human being, dying of thirst alone in the middle of Death Valley for no purpose is bad. If someone disagrees, then he/she is either lying or deranged. That does not mean that ethics cannot be a scientific pursuit, because all sciences start from (usually tacit) assumptions, such as the assumption that something called “reality” exists outside our minds. If you dismiss Harris’s approach because it stars with an assumption, then you should dismiss absolutely everything else, because you cannot prove that reality exists.
2.
I doubt that you know women who have been traumatised by what Dawkins calls “mild sexual abuse”. As I said in a previous comment, if it traumatised them then by definition it was not mild, and hence was not what Dawkins was referring to. As you said, abuse “should not be considered to be minor unless it is minor for the person concerned”. Hence, claiming that a victim of “mild” sexual abuse was traumatised by it is inconsistent.
3.
Mental events occur in a physical structure. There are no known instances of minds without brains, hence it is rational to assume that a mind is a set of brain processes, and ultimately a physical phenomenon. I can see no reason why a device that mimics every single neuron of a person’s brain should not, when wired to that person’s nervous system, function exactly as that person’s brain and hence host what we call his/her mind. If that argument does not convince you, try this: imagine an assortment of organisms, ranging from cells to humans. Which of those organisms would you endow with the property of having a mind? Where would you draw the line, and why? I’m sure you’ll agree that a chimp and a gorilla are good candidates for mind hosts, whereas an amoeba is not. If minds are not physical, at which point in evolution are organisms endowed with the ability to carry out processes outside the physical universe?
4.
You seem to forget that physical phenomena can be extremely complex. Trying to find intentionality in a single physical event is like trying to find music in one the series of 0’s and1’s etched on a CD. The music is in the process codified by those 0’s and 1’s, not in the bits taken individually.
5.
Of course cognitive science has answered all the questions. Nothing has answered all the questions. But as scientific knowledge accumulates, more and better answers are found. Claiming that mental processes do not occur in the physical realm is a dead end.
6.
Ophelia said in a post, and I believe you’d agree, that not all knowledge is scientific, and gave knowing-how as an example. I think the example is apt, but only because we admit too broad a range of meaning for the concept of “knowledge”. The statements “I know how to ride a bycicle” and “I know there is no greatest prime number” are completely different things, The first statement means exactly “I am capable of riding a bycicle”, whereas the second cannot be similarly paraphrased. If the “I am capable of” frame does not fit the second statement, then the meanings of “know how” and “know” are disjoint. It is an unfortunate linguistic peculiarity that the same word appears in both statements. “Knowing how” is not “knowledge”. Knowledge that cannot be communicated with words is not knowledge. Knowledge is a set of well-formed formulas from which a prediction can be made with a greater-than-chance probability.
7.
Precisely. I have never come across any example of non-scientific knowledge, and the one provided by Ophelia fails, in my opinion, because it describes an ability, and that tells us nothing about the world (of course, you can learn about the world while learning how to do something, but then we would be referring to the second meaning of knowledge). Indeed, I have great difficulty trying to imagine what meaning can be carried by the string “non-scientific knowledge”. But since you said that “there seem to be hosts of things that we can know that cannot be included easily under the general rubric of science,” maybe you can provide me with a few examples.
8.
That’s not a problem: “science, broadly construed” is simply the set of all knowledge or, in other words, the set of all well-formed formulas from which a prediction with greater-than-chance probability can be validly derived.
9.
I’d say that the aim is to expose the emptiness of religious claims. Religious knowledge need no exclusion, since it does not exist.
Science is not the set of all knowledge. Have you never heard of history, for example?
I’m starting to think you’re a parody.
piero @47,
One problem is that there is no scope or quantification* so that the example has implications beyond what was intended; try symbolising as it stands other in than simple propositional logic and see if you can avoid it additionally implying that every killing by a stranger is worse than every killing by a lover.
Another is that it clearly implies one is to be preferred over the other.
Another is that he previously poisoned his own well having previously claimed something was “zero bad”.
—
* Had the example been qualified with an ‘if’ it would have avoided that particular problem.
[OT + meta]
I can’t resist.
piero @51:
And video games are nothing more than manipulating pixels on a display and sound waves on a speaker until a particular pattern is achieved.
(Reductionism as explanatory FTW!
or: the territory is not the map)
History is scientific knowledge. How is historical knowledge to be evaluated, if not by testing hypotheses derived from it? And a parody of what, exactly?
I took the premises and the conclusion to be universally quantified. As I said, the problem lies in the truth value of the second premise, not in the validity of the argument.
The problem with your analogy lies in the “nothing more” bit. A video game is instanced as bytes in a computer’s memory. If you duplicate the bytes in another computer’s memory, you’ll play the same game. At no point will you need to add a “special ingredient X” on top of the bytes.
piero, I’ve left a response in the Withdrawing Room.
Yes, indeed, Ophelia, I think Piero is a parody of what is, in my view, wrong with a lot of the new atheism, which is why I took my leave of it some time ago. The huffing and puffing about science is a good indication of that, along with the pretence to know something about logic and informal argument when he doesn’t. I could give chapter and verse from the comments above, but I have no real interest in continuing the discussion further. So, I have finished with this discussion. What amuses me is the certainty with which Piero holds his views, and the truly incompetent way he tries to justify them. This kind of silly dogmatism is so common in religion. It’s a pity that it is in the process of taking over unbelief as well. If you think that harsh, Piero, I apologise, of course, but your combative way of responding to comments, and pretending to argue for positions in philosophy (philosophy of history, for one) would be laughable were it not becoming so common.
Eric, I don’t mind harshness, I do mind that you do not substantiate your claims, I am prepared to accept my being incompetent and a parody if you provide good reasons. If you really have no interest in pursuing this discussion, then do not pursue it; but calling me incompetent and a parody and then withdraw from the debate is much less than I expected from you.
Well, Piero, let’s take just one. You say, in response to Ophelia,
Certainly, empirical evidence is important in history, but empirical evidence only provides the skeleton for history to work on. What is most important, and what makes history interesting and important, is the interpretive work that is done by the historian. If history were only based on empirically verifiable propositions, we would have very little history indeed, especially of early periods. But, even knowing more about the empirical facts of, say, Hitler’s rise to power in interwar Germany, facts about his speeches, the results of elections, the specific actions of his Brown Shirts, etc., does not help us to understand how and why he rose to power, matters that can be hashed and rehashed, painted in broad strokes, or described in minute detail, without there being any specific empirical events that can, as such, confirm them. The same goes for our interpretive knowledge of other people. We do it all the time, and sometimes we get it right, sometimes wrong. Let me give you an example, Field Marshal Montgomery, during the war years, entrusted his son David to the care of Tom and Phyllis Reynolds, and wrote them often (especially Phyllis) from his Tac Headquarters on the battlefield, as he made his way from Egypt to Germany. Later, when Phyllis’s son phoned to tell Montgomery that his mother had died of a heart attack, Montgomery took notice of the fact and apparently ignored it altogether. He did not go to her funeral, and did not even tell his son David. That’s a fact. But what does it say about Montgomery? It’s hard to say, but there are at least two (and probably many other) possible interpretations. It might be that he was so grief-stricken at her death, that he could not bear to be seen in public (shortly before this he had been quite upset when someone he was visiting had a birthday party for her son while he was there. He went to his room, and she thought that she had made an awful faux pas. The trouble was that this was the first birthday party that he had attended since the death of his wife, and he was overcome with grief, so this interpretation would not be outlandish). Or, he may simply have moved on with his life, and no longer found Phyllis Reynolds of interest. I don’t know. But history is like that. The facts themselves have to be interpreted and placed in a narrative where they make (interpretive) sense. The empirical facts alone are not enough. History is not a science. But you state your response with so much certainty, and with so little awareness of the complexity of history and how it is done, that you do in fact turn into a parody. A parody of what? A parody of a knowledgeable person. It is for precisely this reason that I find little profit in discussing with you.
Eric, I found your comment interesting and was about to respond. Then I saw the last two phrases. Bye.