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Stanley Fish is doing his Brendan O’Neill act. There is no view from nowhere, therefore no claim is better founded than any other claim, it’s all just likes and dislikes. [D]espite invocations of fairness and equality and giving every voice a chance, classical liberals, like any other ideologues (and ideologues we all are), divide the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Epistemology’
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Bifurcated epistemology is doing it wrong
March 25th, 2012 
Ophelia Benson PZ is doing another talk tomorrow, at the American Atheists National Convention. Subject: “Scientists! If you aren’t an atheist, you’re doing it wrong!” Regular commenter (here as well as there) julian disagreed. Meh. I’d say if a philosopher’s not an atheist they’re doing it wrong but a scientist can be whatevs so long as they’re [...]
What Ehrman actually says
March 22nd, 2012 Ophelia Benson Richard Carrier takes a look at Bart Ehrman’s article at the Huffington Post on the did-Jesus-exist question. One point Richard makes jumped out at me, because the same thing jumped out at me in Ehrman’s book. Mistake #2: Ehrman actually says (and I can’t believe it, but these are his exact words): With respect to Jesus, we [...]
Reducing the influence of religion in the world
March 18th, 2012 Ophelia Benson Victor Stenger’s talk on the panel at Moving Secularism Forward is at the Huffington Post, and I think it’s clear that he doesn’t think religious belief should be “eradicated” by sword and fire, but rather that it should be undermined and diminished over time by better ways of getting at the truth. Scientists have to [...]
Belief as pickpocket
March 18th, 2012 Ophelia Benson I’m amicably disagreeing with Ron Lindsay at his CFI blog, where he is amicably disagreeing with Vic Stenger and PZ Myers about something both of them said at the Sunday morning panel in Orlando two weeks ago. (I was on the same panel.) Both Stenger and Myers made various recommendations about objectives on which secularists [...]
What is belief
February 28th, 2012 Ophelia Benson A stack of interesting comments on the thread about getting it; about whether or not it took; about the feeling of belief. It’s interesting that they all converge, those by people like me who as far as they can tell never got it, and those by people who did get it at some point but [...]
More than one valence
February 14th, 2012 Ophelia Benson Something I’m ambivalent about: On the one hand, there’s the value of being reasonable, and trying to see all sides of a question. There’s the value of not getting things wrong by being too one-sided; by confirmation bias; by seeing everything the way you see everything and so becoming blind to other ways of seeing [...]
Second-guessing subjective experiences
January 29th, 2012 Ophelia Benson Mark Vernon wrote a response to Julian’s Heathen’s Progress series. It’s got to do with the fact that cognition is embodied, which Vernon somehow takes to mean that subjective convictions are trustworthy, or something along those lines. …the modern sceptic is suspicious of subjective convictions. They fixate on the many ways in which individuals can [...]
The uses of commitment
January 8th, 2012 Ophelia Benson As I was saying… in free inquiry one doesn’t want taboos, to put it mildly. In political commitments, however, one does (in a sense). What sense? Maybe the most basic one, the one you learn slowly as a child: that other people have minds too, and they are different from yours, and you can’t treat them [...]
BioLogos snares an MIT physicist
December 9th, 2011 Ophelia Benson Via Sigmund at WEIT, an MIT physicist offers part 1 of a series on “scientism.” Yes really, an MIT physicist. I know, I know. He (Ian Hutchinson) gives the gist in the first para. One of the most visible conflicts in current culture is between “scientism” and religion. Because religious knowledge differs from scientific knowledge, scientism claims [...]
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