Weird truth

Truth is, to be sure, an absolute notion, in the following sense: 'true for me but not for you' and 'true in my culture but not in yours' are weird, pointless locutions. So is 'true then but not now.'--Richard Rorty
(https://twitter.com/tpmquote/status/1483091753808941058?s=02)

This Is No Way to Be Human - The Atlantic

...we need to be more mindful of what this technology has cost us and the vital importance of direct experiences with nature. And by "cost," I mean what Henry David Thoreau meant in Walden: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run..." Alan Lightman

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/01/machine-garden-natureless-world/621268/

The Best Books on American Philosophy | Five Books Expert Recommendations by John Kaag

...there is another aspect to Emerson, even in the First Series, that balances out this individualism. I think that's what's really interesting in the First Series and in Emerson's essays generally.

We have 'Self-Reliance,' but then we have a sister essay in the same series called 'Compensation' which looks nothing like 'Self-Reliance.' Similarly, in the Second Series, you have two sister essays that reflect the same issue of power and fate. The difficulty and the challenge of reading Emerson is to read these diametrically opposed positions together or side-by-side and see them as creating a productive tension. 'Compensation' says that your freedom is always limited by your history. Freedom is always limited by the genealogy that you find yourself in. This too, I think, would resonate with Nietzsche. But, more specifically, Emerson says that we always operate within a wider cosmic, social and political give-and-take. There is no action without an equal and opposite reaction. And that reaction is just as real and just as connected to us as the action itself. For example, you can think about 'Self-Reliance' as this promethean call to activity, whereas 'Compensation' is this sense that we must hold back, or rather that we must hold things in reserve, or that our actions are always set within a wider context or network of relations. So, I think these two essays, with this push towards freedom and the pull towards togetherness that you see in 'Self-Reliance' and 'Compensation,' are interesting poles that create the tension that drives American Transcendentalism but also American Pragmatism...

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/american-philosophy-john-kaag/

You Can’t Force It: Doug Anderson on American Philosophy – Blog of the APA

...the line John (Kaag) heard from Jennifer, one of the Hocking daughters—"You can't force it"–when he was learning to use a scythe. This down to earth lesson occurs again and again throughout the book and sometimes I think John doesn't even notice. It also applies to the writing of the book. In writing an argumentative essay, you can "force" it–there's a generic recipe or blueprint at hand for that. But telling this story from the experiences out to the thought is a much different way of writing...

https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/02/07/why-you-cant-force-it-doug-anderson-on-american-philosophy/?amp

Kaag interview 2017

Hiking with Emerson

Compensation and love, self-reliance and freedom...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hiking-with-emerson

Novelty and suffering

False dichotomy?

Here is the Brandom/Rorty discussion I said I'd share. It clearly shows that Rorty valorizes novelty (ends) over reducing suffering (means). I tweeted about it a while back, so here is an unroll of the thread: https://t.co/765xa18bc8
And here is more of the passage: https://t.co/JtnmejLjws
(https://twitter.com/ironick/status/1481614352910323714?s=02)

Neal Stephenson's "Peircian analysis of where things stand right now"

...All right, here's another question about how we conceive of the world: One of the things that made the Baroque period so fruitful as a setting for you was the tensions that resulted from superstitious, medieval modes of thinking coexisting alongside the beginnings of the rational Enlightenment. What similar tensions between old and new ways of thinking are alive in our modes of understanding the world? What we're seeing in 

the Baroque Cycle6

 is the beginning of scientific rationalism and the idea that we can find ways to agree on what is true, which was a new development. You know, Barbara Shapiro has a book called 

"A Culture of Fact"7

 that tells the origin story of the idea of facts, which is not an idea we always had. Another thing I've been reading recently is "The Fixation of Belief" by an American philosopher named Charles Sanders Peirce. He was writing in the 1870s, and he goes through a list of four methods that people use to decide what they're going to believe. The first one is called the method of tenacity, which means you decide what you're going to believe and you stick to it regardless of logic or evidence.

Sounds familiar. Yeah, this all sounds depressingly familiar. The next method is called the method of authority, where you agree with other people that you're all going to believe what some authority figure tells you to believe. That's probably most common throughout history. The third method is called the a priori method, and the idea is, let's be reasonable and try to come up with ways to believe things that sound reasonable to us. Which sounds great, but if it's not grounded in any fact-checking methodology, then you end up just agreeing to believe things by consensus — which may be totally wrong. The fourth method is the scientific method. It basically consists of accepting the fact that you might be wrong, and since you might be wrong, you need some way for judging the truth of statements and changing your mind when you've got solid evidence to the contrary. What you're seeing in the Baroque Cycle is the transition from Method No. 3 to No. 4. You've got all these people having what seem like reasoned, logical arguments, but a lot of them are just tripping. So a few come in, like 

Hooke8

 and Newton, and begin using actual experiments and get us going down the road toward the rational world of the Enlightenment. But what we've got now is almost everybody using Method 1, 2 or 3. We've got a lot of authoritarians who can't be swayed by logic or evidence, but we've also got a lot of a priori people who want to be reasonable and think of themselves as smarter and more rational than the authoritarians but are going on the basis of their feelings — what they wish were true — and both of them hate the scientific rationalists, who are very few in number. That's kind of my Peircian analysis of where things stand right now.

Do you see a way out of that? When people find that they can obtain lots of money and power by believing certain things and following certain ways of thinking, then you can bet that they'll enthusiastically start doing that. The reason that Enlightenment thinking became popular was that people figured out that it was in their financial best interest to avail themselves of its powers. The spread of very financially successful enterprises like, let's say, steam engines for long-range ocean navigation was a direct outgrowth of the practical application of the scientific method. To that you could also add a lot of financial apparatus that came into existence around then with the Bank of England and various ways of managing financial affairs. In other words, people don't necessarily follow scientific rationalism because they're noble and pure seekers of the truth, although some of them definitely do it for that reason. More people do it out of self-interest.

It may be the unfortunate case that there's more obvious financial self-interest to be gained by promoting irrational and counterfactual thinking. If you don't have any perceptible downside or negative consequences, then why not sign up with or co-sign the latest conspiracy theory? I do think negative consequences definitely exist, but maybe the cause-and-effect relationship isn't immediately obvious.

What are those negative consequences? What do people stand to lose? Well, the negative consequence is our entire civilization.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/01/10/magazine/neal-stephenson-interview.html?referringSource=articleShare&s=02

Authoritarians vs. truth

Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump's Lies

…Authoritarians don't just want to control the government, the economy and the military. They want to control the truth. Truth has its own authority, an authority a strongman must defeat, at least in the minds of his followers, persuading them to abandon fact, the standards of verification, critical thinking and all the rest. Such people become a standing army awaiting their next command. —Rebecca Solnit

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/republicans-trump-lies.html?referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Dewey on decline & despair

"Is there any hope in politics? Is there any hope for politics as a serious concern of the masses who are not interested in governmental jobs? These questions are not academic. They are connected with the decline of democracy & the growing despair of its efficiency"
-J Dewey 1931
(https://twitter.com/AgnesCallard/status/1479091869787336711?s=02)

Dewey's pedagogical style

John Dewey, as described by one of his students: https://t.co/obUHncZFal
(https://twitter.com/AgnesCallard/status/1478036273822453760?s=02)