You haven't proven the belief that you aren't dreaming is true. You have no evidence to support it. It's quite frankly a guess based on nothing. You can believe whatever you want but don't know if it's true, you just think so.
The evidence is that my waking experience exhibits continuity and consistency. Today I have been awake for hours and I have clear memories of all that time in which events follow logically one after the other. Furthermore, the events of today follow logically from the events of yesterday, and so on all the way back for years. Every day, every hour, every minute I experience that is continuous and consistent with the past constitutes evidence that I am experiencing something real and external to me. The probability that I am simply hallucinating things that happen to be consistent gets lower and lower, and the probability that the consistency is the result of reality grows higher and higher. This is how evidence works. This is what evidence is.
If you're flipping a coin over and over again, and you keep getting heads, this constitutes evidence that the coin you're flipping is double-headed or otherwise non-random. It is always possible that you're flipping a fair coin and you just happen to get heads every time. You can never prove that the coin is double-headed (assuming this is your only method of testing it). But the probability of the coin being fair drops by half with every flip. The probability of a fair coin getting heads is 1/2 on the first flip. The probability of it getting two heads on the first two flips is 1/4. The probability of it getting three heads on the first three flips is 1/8. And so on and so forth. It does not take very many flips before the probability of the coin being fair is extremely low, and you can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that the coin is double-headed. After a hundred heads, the probability of it being fair is about the same as the probability of being struck by lightning this year... on five separate occasions. At that point, it would be pretty asinine to say, "But you have no proof the coin is double-headed. You can't know it is. You're just guessing it is based on nothing." Yes, you can; yes, you do; and no, you're not.
As for what radica skepticism has done it talks of what it can do. Bringing someone a sense of tranquility by doubting everything and not passing judgment on anything. Saying that the problems in the world are the result of beliefs and opinions and the solution is to extinguish them. It's quite similar to Buddhism in some regards. Also states that we suffer by labeling things good and bad and suffer in their pursuit and absence.
Nothing you're saying constitutes a valid argument for radical skepticism. You are recommending the theory on the basis of incidental effects it may have on our mental state. Theists sometimes similarly recommend belief in God on the basis that it might make you feel better about yourself and the world. This is called the appeal to consequences, and it has no bearing on whether or not radical skepticism or theism is justified. Maybe believing that there's pirate gold buried in my backyard would make me feel better, but if in fact there isn't, I ought not to believe that there is. Maybe believing in God would make me feel better, but if in fact God does not exist, I ought not to believe that he does. Maybe disbelieving reality would make me feel better, but if in fact reality does exist, I ought to believe that it does.
I might also bring up a second problem with this recommendation, that severing attachments is more likely to lead to or exacerbate depression than bring contentment. But that's more a matter of psychology than philosophy.
But like I said before, the Gettier problem has rendered JTB a poor definition of knowledge. BAsed on your replies you havent been sufficient to overturn that.
The concept of intensional statements renders the Gettier problem a poor objection to JTB.
No, I'm not going to tell you why. I'm just going to state that your failure to respond adequately to this claim demonstrates that it is correct.
And in regard to science, bare in mind that it has also achieved a great deal of problems in addition to the gifts (maybe even more than the good). That seems to be what uncertainty brings
You're missing the point -- and unwittingly conceding it. The point is that science has achieved. If empirical reasoning and the knowledge it generates were useless, then science could no more develop nuclear weapons than it could smallpox vaccines.
I'm no lawyer, but my understanding is that he certainly doesn't have the power you're suggesting that he does here. There's been no attack on the United States and no word from congress. That explains why we're already seeing some questions about the legality even of this minimal action that he did take (refer to my previous citation).
Legally? In a vacuum, yes, you're probably right. However, this is how presidents have used the War Powers Resolution for decades now. You can certainly complain about the constitutionality of the action, but it's not intrinsically any more political risk to him than, say, Clinton ordering air strikes in the Balkans.
He's kinda getting hit from almost every angle here. You have the anti-war left now claiming him to be a warmonger - or like you said, the whole wag the dog deal.
Which anti-war leftists exactly do you think were on Trump's side before but are against him now?
Again, probably nothing will come of this. I suppose the Dems hate him even more than usual so there's a chance they'll try to make hay here, but even if they wanted to, they're the minority party.
You've got this backlash from the right that either believes that Assad didn't use chemical weapons and this is all some big conspiracy or that, even if Assad is using chemical weapons, the fact remains that he's fighting ISIS and so let's just look the other way.
Who exactly are you talking about here? Trump's base has proven that they'll believe anything that comes out of his mouth no matter how ridiculous. But when he tells them something that actually seems to be the truth, all of a sudden they think their "tells-it-like-it-is" champion is part of a conspiracy? No. Trump is throwing American weight around again in the Middle East! This is going to be wildly popular on the right.
Just throwing it out their but America? America has special interests in Syria.
Such as...? One of the most common accusations is that America has been sitting back and letting Syria go to hell for six years because we don't have significant interests there. And even if we did, if Trump really wanted to to increase our involvement in the Syrian civil war, he would not need to commit a false-flag crime against humanity to do it. In fact, he doesn't seem to want to increase involvement. As has already been noted, a Tomahawk strike is pretty much the minimal response he could take while still appearing "tough" and to be enforcing the "red line". Furthermore, all this comes just a week after Tillerson said it was no longer the U.S.'s goal that Assad step down. So by far the most likely chain of events is that (1) Trump wants to deescalate American involvement in Syria; (2) Assad murders dozens of people with an illegal weapon of mass destruction... again; (3) Trump is forced to do something in order not to appear as weak as Obama did, even though he'd rather not.
But you'll underestimate Assad? What about his special interests in Syria, since, y'know, he rules the country and the entire reason for this civil war is that he wants to continue to do so?
I know some Syrian refugees and that's who they think did it.
With all due respect to their situation, it does not seem likely that it grants them any special insight into American strategic capabilities and goals. Do they have a real and specific analysis of the whys and hows of alleged U.S. involvement, or is this just more America-the-Bogeyman?
I'm trying to give a rat's butt about how the big bad republicans stole this supreme court seat but I just can't, not when there is this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kasiov0ytEc going on and a conservative supreme court maybe our only hope.
So... you approve of Republicans violating the Constitution to seize political power because there's a vague chance they may use that power to prevent violations of the Constitution? Am I getting that right?
He can't do that legally. I mean, I appreciate all the reasonable critiques of his decisions but he can't actually do that. He was stretching the limits just by doing what he did here.
...no, he wasn't. This was the "minimum use of force" approach. I'd bet dollars to donuts his advisors gave him a menu of options that got way more explosive.
The question, it seems to me, is not whether to do this or whether do something more impactful. It's whether to do this or do something less impactful. He chose the most impactful action in front of him and it's one that puts him at a significant political risk because it's only borderline legal to begin with.
This is almost exactly the reverse of the truth. He chose the action that had the smallest actual impact on the ground while still generating the headline "TRUMP ORDERS MISSILE STRIKE IN SYRIA" and thus appearing tough to please his base. And yes, this is an area the president should be tough. Obama should have given this order years ago. I'm cautiously optimistic that it happened. But calling it a political risk? Not even close.
But in regards to dreaming, there is simply no way to know that you aren't dreaming.
No. There is no way to be certain that we're not dreaming. The distinction is critical, and your continued equivocation between knowledge and certainty is a major sticking point here.
Even that quote (I forget who said it) stated that he dreamt he was a butterfly. Upon waking he couldn't tell if he was himself dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreamning it was human.
Zhuangzi. A damn fine philosopher -- rare in ancient China.
You can only know it's not real after waking, but during the dream you believe it to be real. Given that, you cannot know you are currently not dreaming.
Of course I cannot know I'm dreaming under these circumstances. You're stipulating that I in fact am dreaming, so any belief I have that I'm not would be false and a false belief by definition cannot be knowledge. But you have not addressed the case where I believe I'm not dreaming and that belief is true. Not have you broached the question of justification at all. And yeah, I know you think the justified true belief definition of knowledge is dead, but you have yet to prove that so I'm going to keep using it until you do, or at the very least until you can provide an alternative definition of your own to discuss.
I don't see how that quote by Kant really adds anything here.
Dove flight = human knowledge
Air = human senses and reason
Air resistance = fallibility of human senses and reason
Dove trying to fly in vacuum = human trying to gain knowledge in vacuum
It doesn't mater whether physicists disagree on that point (assuming others people even exist which can't be known). The point is they can't prove that isn't the case.
Science is not in the business of providing proof. Ever. Science is strictly an empirical endeavor which can only push theories to ever-higher degrees of confidence through cumulative evidence and experiment. And science is the most fantastically successful intellectual pursuit the human race has ever undertaken. This uncertain foundation you so bewail is sturdy enough to feed us and light our homes and cure our illnesses and transmit our words to each other from opposite ends of the earth. What has radical skepticism accomplished in comparison?
And the Gettier problem essentially drove the nail in the coffin for justified true belief, to the point that JTBF isn't a sufficient basis to evaluate knowledge anymore.
This is simply not an accurate description of the state of the philosophical field on JTB. It is very much a live theory. You can't just say "Gettier problem" to dismiss it -- not like you could say, oh, "Gödel's theorems" to dismiss an allegedly complete and consistent mathematics. If you want to claim that the Gettier problem sinks JTB as we're using it in this thread, you're going to have to put forward an argument for that claim. And you can't, because it's irrelevant. Even insofar as it is a problem for JTB, it's a problem for an aspect of JTB that has nothing to do with the issues of empiricism and confidence that we're talking about here. Do you disagree that it's irrelevant? Okay, then show me how it's relevant.
You say that we know that things exist what has been said is that we interact with them and therefor we know they exist. But as I said, this can apply to dreams, and the things in dream don't truly exist even though you interact with them. Not to mention that would muddy things further by not being able to prove one isn't dreaming (another problem with skepticism).
People can believe false propositions. This should not be surprising to you. People can even be justified in believing false propositions. I might look at the clock and justifiably believe that it's three o'clock, when in fact it's four and the clock stopped an hour ago. I think I know that it's three o'clock, but because my belief is false, I don't actually know that. However, if the clock is working and it actually is three o'clock, then I do know it. (The third possibility, that the clock is stopped but by coincidence it happens to be three o'clock anyway, is one of those fun little philosophical puzzles about JTB theory.)
Your concern about dreams runs through the same analysis. Given the general reliability of your senses, you are justified in believing that what you perceive is real. If you are in fact dreaming, the belief is justified but false, and you do not have knowledge. But if you're not dreaming, the belief is justified and true, and you do have knowledge. In short, the possibility that you're dreaming doesn't mean you can't have knowledge -- it only means you might not have knowledge. Is this a perfect situation? No, of course not. But as I keep reminding you, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Our knowledge is good enough to get stuff done. Our lives would not be improved by sitting around moping that we're not absolutely certain what we perceive is real.
I don't know the sun will rise tomorrow. I assume it does.
An assumption is a belief. You believe it. Your belief is justified because you've observed the sun coming up every day of your life, and everyone else you talk to or read about has observed the sun coming up every day of theirs, and the consensus scientific model of the solar system based on still more observations tells us that the sun has come up every day for the past five billion years and will continue to come up for five billion more. And we can now say with the confidence of direct observation that your belief is true, because I wrote that yesterday, it's now tomorrow, and the sun in fact came up. So you have justified true belief. You have knowledge.
Could all these observations be the result of a dream or hallucination? Yes, we can never rule out the possibility completely. This does not undermine justification, in the same way that the possibility you will win the lottery does not undermine justification in believing you won't. It would be a coincidence of the most spectacular degree for every observation you make to be consistent with living in a rules-governed physical universe when this is not the case.
I even have to assume the Big Bang and all that is true because I cannot know that the universe didn't just pop up with all the memories and knowledge in it five minutes ago.
Physicists don't take that possibility seriously. Like Schrödinger's Cat for quantum uncertainty, it is a deliberately absurd thought experiment used to illustrate just how incomplete our understanding of entropy is.
Empirical data is based on flawed senses that we can't be sure are being deceived at this very moment. Skepticism can argue that such knowledge is useless because it is obtained by imperfect means and is more opinion than knowledge.
It does not follow that knowledge is useless when it is obtained by imperfect means. I have been arguing throughout that knowledge can be useful despite being obtained by imperfect means. You need to stop fixating on the imperfection as though it were the end of the story. It's not. Empiricism works. All your protestations of uselessness ring hollow in light of that basic fact. Rather than repeat empty denials, you need to address it.
They argue the same about our evaluations about good and bad and say that our suffering is based on chasing and holding onto good and avoiding bad. Even reasoning is inseparable from emotion as they say.
Kant is not normally very quotable, but he does occasionally turn a poignant phrase:
“The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.”
Descartes tries to get around their doubt of all things but could only conclude that thought occurs and that cannot be doubted.
Descartes concludes that the world we perceive is real and that our senses can be trusted. You may not agree with his reasoning in getting there -- I certainly don't -- but you're misrepresenting him in claiming that doubt is his conclusion.
Given that nothing can be proven for certain, it seems that just about anything can be called "knowledge". Confidence can be used to justify anything and it wouldn't be knowledge. The Gettier problem addressing this bit quite well.
I'm afraid you're revealing a basic misunderstanding in a couple of areas here. Firstly, confidence is not used to justify anything. Confidence is the result of justification. If a belief is justified, we may rationally be confident in it; otherwise, we should not. Secondly, the Gettier problem does not address issues of confidence or indeed any of the objections you are making. The Gettier problem explores what happens when you treat beliefs as straightforward propositions of classical logic and apply certain counterintuitive properties of conjunction and disjunction to them. That's not what we're talking about here.
Because confidence isn't a measure for knowledge. I don't know it exists or that you do, I assume that and you cannot assume anything in philosophy if you want truth. There are no givens.
This is begging the question. You are using the conclusion you wish to reach -- that we don't know anything unless we know it perfectly -- as your premise. We do in fact know that things exist, and it has been explained to you how this is the case. If you keep repeating that we don't, you are simply arguing in circles and wasting everybody's time here.
Confidence is additionally a poor use for knowledge and it doesn't prove anything. You can be confident in just about anything. So I'm not acting on knowledge but belief.
You can be confident in just about anything, but empirical reasoning allows us to determine what it is rational to be confident in and what not. It is not rational, for instance, to be confident that you will win the lottery: all the evidence you observe leads to the conclusion that winning is highly improbable. But it is rational to be confident that the sun will come up tomorrow: every observation you and the rest of the human race has made is consistent with a model of the universe where that happens. So yes, you can be confident in both propositions, but the two confidences are not equivalent. You do not know you will win the lottery. You may believe it, but your belief is neither justified nor true. But you do know that the sun will come up tomorrow. Your belief is justified and true.
Plus I believe the whole "justified true belief" bit was slaughtered already.
Um... no. "Justified true belief" is the standard (shorthand) definition of knowledge in epistemology. Yes, there are puzzles and problems in the details, as is always the case in philosophy. But if you think you've "slaughtered" it, then you've made a bona fide breakthrough. And I hate to burst your bubble, but you haven't.
In less crazy times, Gorsuch would have been confirmed easily. (In 1986, Scalia was confirmed 98-0.) He is from everything I've seen an excellent judge and near-ideal candidate for the position in terms of qualifications, intelligence, and temperament -- honestly not the sort of person I expected Trump to nominate. Does he hold conservative political views? Yes. Of course. But that's how our democracy works. The American people decided that they wanted a conservative to be the guy picking the judges. So if the Democrats were trying to block Gorsuch simply on ideological grounds, I'd be... well, filled with a frustration of a weary and familiar sort, because it's the same thing that they tried to do to Roberts and Alito, and that the GOP tried to do to Sotomayor and Kagan, in this increasingly dysfunctional government of ours.
The stolen seat complicates matters, though. I have a lot more sympathy for Dems blocking a nominee who -- whatever his qualifications -- should never have been appointed. You never want to just let your opponent get away with a dirty trick like that. But on the other hand, that dirty trick represents yet another escalation in the dysfunction, and responding in kind makes it the new normal. I want that even less. And on practical grounds this does not seem like a smart battle to fight. What outcome do the Democrats expect here if they block Gorsuch? To see Trump re-nominate Garland, or nominate a pro-choice judge? That's never going to happen. It'd be hard for any plausible future nominee to be any better than Gorsuch, and they could easily be a lot worse. To keep the seat empty for another four years until a Democrat is in the White House? One year was outrageous enough; four would be a frank admission that the system is broken (and, of course, the Republicans could just do it back to them again). So in the end, galling as it is under the circumstances to give the Republicans what they wanted, I think the best move here is to confirm Gorsuch, take a baby step towards returning the judicial confirmation process to business as usual, and look for some less self-destructive way to make the GOP pay for their stunt.
Should there be a formal rule that Supreme Court seats NOT be filled on election years?
Absolutely not. The President is the President until 12:00 PM ET on January 20th. He has all the powers of his office, including the power to appoint Supreme Court justices, and the Senate has the responsibility to review and vote on those appointments. What next? The President can't issue vetos during the last six months of a term? No executive orders in the last thirty days? No pardons for the last year and a half? If we say the President can't do something because at some point in the future there might be some other President who would do it differently, why even have a President at all?
Because the topic of this discussion has become essentially identical to that of AzureDuality's radical skepticism thread, I invite everyone to continue the talk there instead of here.
Wouldn't a better question be why it DOES NOT require absolute certainty? I mean, how can one act on imperfect knowledge?
You're doing it right now. You know your computer exists, you know my computer exists, you know I exist, you know English, you know I read English, you know your computer can transmit English words to my computer... and so on. None of this knowledge is absolutely certain, but you have a high enough degree of confidence in it to act on it. And that confidence is justified, because the universe you observe continues to behave in a manner consistent with your knowledge. You're receiving a message from me in English that is coherent as a response to what you wrote. You are not watching your computer turn into the giant disembodied head of Edgar Allan Poe and roll away. You expected the former result to be much more probable than the latter, and you were right. Good job!
So given all this, whatever makes you think you can't act on imperfect knowledge?
I'm going to need you to give me more specifics here because Hitler didn't enter power because he was elected as head of state. From what I'm reading, he was appointed Chancellor by the man that actually won the election with 53% of the vote in the second round of voting, and then Hitler snuck power to himself and the Nazis through parliamentary acts rather than gaining a majority.
Okay, the leadership situation in the Weimar Republic was weird. The man who appointed Hitler Chancellor, Paul von Hindenburg, was the President of Germany. The President was elected in a separate election by direct majority vote, and occupied a position roughly comparable to the monarchs of parliamentary monarchies. Like a monarch, his duties included formally appointing the Chancellor, equivalent to a Prime Minister. But, again like a monarch, the expectation seems to have been that his appointment would be a formality in recognition of whoever won the parliamentary elections and successfully formed a government. (Even today, formally speaking, Teresa May is Prime Minister of Great Britain because she was appointed to that office by Queen Elizabeth II -- it's just that the Queen always appoints the leader of the winning party.) Now, the Weimar Republic was young and had a very unstable political situation, and Hindenburg seems to have been deeply ambivalent about Hitler on a personal level, so there was some question as to whether he would appoint the Nazi Chancellor or actually use his discretion. But in the end, apparently out of a desire to mitigate the instability, he did appoint Hitler, to the world's sorrow.
And since I'm on a time crunch at a moment, I'm not picking up on how parliamentarian selection of the chancellor works beyond secret ballot, so citizens technically didn't elect Angela Merkel, they elected the people that elected her, and I think that even then that requires a majority of Parliament in to be declared the victor.
We technically didn't elect Donald Trump, we elected the people that elected him, and he required a majority of the Electoral College to be declared the victor.
Furthermore, had Trump not gotten a majority of the Electoral College, the Presidency would have been decided in the House of Representatives, where he would again have needed a majority to be declared the victor (which he would have gotten).
But you're right, the citizens didn't directly elect Merkel. They elected representatives from various parties who negotiated to create a majority coalition in Parliament. This coalition then elected Merkel. That doesn't mean as much as you seem to think, though. Like the monarch in a parliamentary monarchy, the coalition is always going to vote into the Chancellorship the leader of the plurality party. It's how that system works in practice. And the bare fact remains that of the ballots cast, only 35% were for Merkel's CDU/CSU party, which makes Trump's 46% look pretty good by comparison.
I feel like your comparisons, well at least the Hitler one, don't survive under scrutiny. I'm going to need to know more about German modern elections, but my first impression is that they select by majority selection rather than plurality of the vote like that exists in the United States.
Again: the United States does not and has not ever selected the President based on the plurality of the vote. If no candidate gets an absolute majority of the Electoral College, we go to the House.
From what I'm reading, big tent parties have more trouble adjusting to major changes than a coalition of smaller parties. There's also that the discussion of ideas is either limited by both big tent parties having blind spots to the issue or by the issue being whittled down to two different viewpoints, cutting off discussion of other ways (ie. the environment is being addressed right now by not being addressed because it cuts into big business, but during the election in addition to that there was gradual change as proposed by Clinton and making the shifts an emergency priority as proposed by Jill Stein. Two people are not likely going to discuss three different viewpoints when one of their viewpoints is not either of their own. And even though Bernie took a more Green Party approach to the environment, his viewpoint never crossed the Republican path).
This just means the primaries are really important for determining the direction of the party. Which this election cycle ought to have amply demonstrated.
This also means that two system parties can win over one issue voters. That example is that abortion is a complex issue, and if you take the pro-life choice, it has also been historically bundled with trickle-down economics. Those issues have nothing to do with each other, and until the rise and fall of Gary Johnson (who I think may have been pro-choice and trickle down economics... libertarians are a blind spot to me), there was no other option.
What's different if you're a single issue voter in a multiparty system? Say you vote religiously for the Pro-Life Party. Well, they're not going to get an absolute majority in parliament, so they're gonna be forming a coalition with somebody. And politics being what they are they're probably only going to be forming coalitions with parties on the right. So a vote for the Pro-Life Party is essentially a vote for a right-wing coalition that has "bundled" laissez-faire economics, nationalism, social conservatism, and other issues. Now, the relative strengths of those issues may wax and wane with the fortunes of the parties pushing them, but the same thing happens in the Republican primaries as well. This time around, for instance, the GOP decided it wasn't too interested in social conservatism or laissez-faire economics.
This either 1. results in compromise (acceptable because in a multi-party system you're essentially electing someone to compromise on your behalf rather than making the compromise yourself) or 2. results in lower voter turnout because people don't want to compromise (not something I would find acceptable).
There is no rule that registering to a party or assuming the label of a party requires that person to vote for that party in a two-party system, and that rule doesn't exist in 3rd Parties or multi-party systems either. I fail to see the impact this observation.
In a multiparty system, you can cast your vote for a party and then see that party form a coalition with the side you did not expect. It's rare in practice, but it's possible. Imagine voting for a Green candidate and then watching the Greens join Trump's coalition. Very different situation than you yourself deciding to vote for Trump, isn't it?
Also, let's follow this rabbit down the rabbit hole (more tangents, YAY!) Trump didn't win because he flipped enough Obama voters. The estimated number of voters turned away because they failed to meet ID requirements outnumbers them.
The downward trend of Clinton's voters to non-voters because of Comey's announcement he was investigating more Clinton emails has been documented by Nate Silver as a strong possibility for crippling Clinton's finish. Hillary Clinton was burdened by a psy-ops campaign by Wikileaks and likely Russia as well as subjected to a propaganda campaign that dates back well before the primaries even began. Then there's the fact she was mediocre candidate trying to follow Obama's in hindsight lukewarm second term.
Just because some people defected to the right does not demonstrate that calcification is not taking place. Combined with everything else, it means that the Democrats are a weaker party than they thought. Even then, a strong Clinton cry in 2016 was it's Clinton or split the vote to Donald Trump. That's not a policy battle, that's weaponizing partisanship (which by the way in our current system is rewarding politics). By contrast, Donald Trump shored up his base despite being a terrible candidate with so much more baggage than Hillary Clinton. He had three 3rd Party challengers in his orbit, two of which that got mass media attention and more political experience (the third by the way was Constitution Party... which... yeah...but McMullin was probably a better candidate than Trump or Gary Johnson combined), yet both 3rd Party candidates support collapsed because putting Hillary Clinton in the White House was more terrifying than voting for everything that had been revealed about Trump (also, Gary Johnson demonstrated such ineptitude that he invented a new gaffe). So... yeah, it's blurry around the edges, but partisanship is what held Donald Trump together when Hillary Clinton didn't notice how wounded was in her final weeks of her candidacy, not Donald Trump's personality. I'd say that Donald Trump victory demonstrates calcification quite well.
And in a multiparty system, Johnson and McMullin get more votes, but Trump still probably wins the plurality because he's a charismatic demagogue who can attract a lot of votes, and then forms a majority coalition with Johnson and McMullin. Yes, there are a lot of factors that contributed to Trump's win. You have yet to demonstrate how the first-past-the-post system was one of them in any predictable or systematic way.
Our broken electoral system put us in this position, and the drawbacks of first past the post voting positioned Donald Trump to win through that broken electoral process. Only 45% of Republican Primary voters voted for Donald Trump to be the nominee of the Republican Party. The other 55% split the vote between sixteen other competitors. However, all those competitors lost because they ran against each other, and instead of that 55% settling on a candidate a large minority (still a minority) gamed the Party and put the least qualified man in charge of their movement because he was the loudest.
So while I appreciate that you have all-caps passion defending our current system, the voting system you are defending as necessary has put a fringe candidate with no qualifications into the White House. I despise the outcome First Past the Post has given us, the majority of Americans are not happy with what first past the post voting spat out of the Republican Primary, and while some others may think we should just put better people into that system, I feel that's a good reason to examine a new system.
I'm confused as to why you're condemning our system for this result and advocating a multiparty system instead when it is routine for presidents/prime ministers in multiparty systems to enter office with much smaller percentages of the vote than that. Yes, first-past-the-post elected a demagogue this time around, but there is nothing in first-past-the-post that makes it more vulnerable to demagogues and nothing in a multiparty system that insulates it from them. A multiparty system elected Hitler, after all, and with just 33% of the vote. If you had been a German in 1934, would you be condemning the multiparty system for the result and advocating for a switch to first-past-the-post? But fast-forward to today: the Federal Republic of Germany still uses a multiparty system, but instead of Hitler they've got the humane and highly competent Angela Merkel (who took office with 35% of the vote, by the way). And looking back at our own system, out of forty-five presidents, we've only elected one Trump. Empirically, both systems seem to have pretty good track records, but nevertheless are still capable of occasionally failing in the face of demagoguery and a populace willing to fall for it.
So maybe take a step back and take an examination of your own reasoning here. Because, bluntly, all I see is sour grapes.
This is actually a little off topic from ranked choice voting, but funneling Greens (and other left political positions) into the Democrat Party while the Republicans funnel Libertarians, Constitution Party, and other definitely at best adjacent right wing issues (and at worst extremist) is it amplifies societal echo chambers/political polarization/split.
Walk me through the logic behind saying that big tent parties are worse echo chambers than small special-interest parties. Certainly the Communists I know who are willing to work with the Democrats are not nearly as batty as the Communists who only hang out with other Communists. Ditto Libertarians et al.
Multi-party generally makes it a requirement for political parties to cooperate in order to operate the government, which requires politicans to run on willingness to cross party lines before entering office. The thought of doing that in the United States right now is a liability for being kicked out of office by a primary challenger.
Yes, small parties have to form coalitions. Big parties are coalitions. And lest you complain that the coalitions are calcified by the two-party system, remember that Trump won by flipping traditionally Democratic states and demographics. It is as if, in a multiparty system, the Blue Collar White Guy Party defected from their traditional left-leaning coalition to form a government with the rightists. Only the decision was made at the individual level rather than the party level. Which actually seems more democratic to me.
Ranked choice voting helps 3rd Parties in other ways. It would help 3rd Parties expand membership, and that's probably more important to 3rd Parties than winning elections. For example, there are Greens in the Democrat Party (as in I've talked with people who have described themselves as such), and that hurts the Green Party.
But, big picture, do we care whether something hurts the Green Party? If there are Greens in the Democratic Party (and we assume for the sake of argument that the Green platform is good), doesn't that make the Democratic Party better? And might that be a better outcome than segregating the Greens into their own little pigeonhole?
But if it's not then how can we call it knowledge?
For the same reason that we call anything by any word: that's the standard accepted definition of what the word means. When somebody tells you, "I know how to drive stick", you can safely assume that they're not telling you they possess absolute metaphysical certainty about the reality and nature of stick shifts. They're telling you they know how to drive stick. It is a very different, and much more practical, statement.
If you're flipping a coin over and over again, and you keep getting heads, this constitutes evidence that the coin you're flipping is double-headed or otherwise non-random. It is always possible that you're flipping a fair coin and you just happen to get heads every time. You can never prove that the coin is double-headed (assuming this is your only method of testing it). But the probability of the coin being fair drops by half with every flip. The probability of a fair coin getting heads is 1/2 on the first flip. The probability of it getting two heads on the first two flips is 1/4. The probability of it getting three heads on the first three flips is 1/8. And so on and so forth. It does not take very many flips before the probability of the coin being fair is extremely low, and you can say with a pretty high degree of confidence that the coin is double-headed. After a hundred heads, the probability of it being fair is about the same as the probability of being struck by lightning this year... on five separate occasions. At that point, it would be pretty asinine to say, "But you have no proof the coin is double-headed. You can't know it is. You're just guessing it is based on nothing." Yes, you can; yes, you do; and no, you're not.
Nothing you're saying constitutes a valid argument for radical skepticism. You are recommending the theory on the basis of incidental effects it may have on our mental state. Theists sometimes similarly recommend belief in God on the basis that it might make you feel better about yourself and the world. This is called the appeal to consequences, and it has no bearing on whether or not radical skepticism or theism is justified. Maybe believing that there's pirate gold buried in my backyard would make me feel better, but if in fact there isn't, I ought not to believe that there is. Maybe believing in God would make me feel better, but if in fact God does not exist, I ought not to believe that he does. Maybe disbelieving reality would make me feel better, but if in fact reality does exist, I ought to believe that it does.
I might also bring up a second problem with this recommendation, that severing attachments is more likely to lead to or exacerbate depression than bring contentment. But that's more a matter of psychology than philosophy.
The concept of intensional statements renders the Gettier problem a poor objection to JTB.
No, I'm not going to tell you why. I'm just going to state that your failure to respond adequately to this claim demonstrates that it is correct.
See the problem here?
Such as...?
You're missing the point -- and unwittingly conceding it. The point is that science has achieved. If empirical reasoning and the knowledge it generates were useless, then science could no more develop nuclear weapons than it could smallpox vaccines.
Which anti-war leftists exactly do you think were on Trump's side before but are against him now?
Again, probably nothing will come of this. I suppose the Dems hate him even more than usual so there's a chance they'll try to make hay here, but even if they wanted to, they're the minority party.
Who exactly are you talking about here? Trump's base has proven that they'll believe anything that comes out of his mouth no matter how ridiculous. But when he tells them something that actually seems to be the truth, all of a sudden they think their "tells-it-like-it-is" champion is part of a conspiracy? No. Trump is throwing American weight around again in the Middle East! This is going to be wildly popular on the right.
But you'll underestimate Assad? What about his special interests in Syria, since, y'know, he rules the country and the entire reason for this civil war is that he wants to continue to do so?
With all due respect to their situation, it does not seem likely that it grants them any special insight into American strategic capabilities and goals. Do they have a real and specific analysis of the whys and hows of alleged U.S. involvement, or is this just more America-the-Bogeyman?
Hillary Rodham Clinton.
This is almost exactly the reverse of the truth. He chose the action that had the smallest actual impact on the ground while still generating the headline "TRUMP ORDERS MISSILE STRIKE IN SYRIA" and thus appearing tough to please his base. And yes, this is an area the president should be tough. Obama should have given this order years ago. I'm cautiously optimistic that it happened. But calling it a political risk? Not even close.
Zhuangzi. A damn fine philosopher -- rare in ancient China.
Of course I cannot know I'm dreaming under these circumstances. You're stipulating that I in fact am dreaming, so any belief I have that I'm not would be false and a false belief by definition cannot be knowledge. But you have not addressed the case where I believe I'm not dreaming and that belief is true. Not have you broached the question of justification at all. And yeah, I know you think the justified true belief definition of knowledge is dead, but you have yet to prove that so I'm going to keep using it until you do, or at the very least until you can provide an alternative definition of your own to discuss.
Dove flight = human knowledge
Air = human senses and reason
Air resistance = fallibility of human senses and reason
Dove trying to fly in vacuum = human trying to gain knowledge in vacuum
Clear now?
Science is not in the business of providing proof. Ever. Science is strictly an empirical endeavor which can only push theories to ever-higher degrees of confidence through cumulative evidence and experiment. And science is the most fantastically successful intellectual pursuit the human race has ever undertaken. This uncertain foundation you so bewail is sturdy enough to feed us and light our homes and cure our illnesses and transmit our words to each other from opposite ends of the earth. What has radical skepticism accomplished in comparison?
This is simply not an accurate description of the state of the philosophical field on JTB. It is very much a live theory. You can't just say "Gettier problem" to dismiss it -- not like you could say, oh, "Gödel's theorems" to dismiss an allegedly complete and consistent mathematics. If you want to claim that the Gettier problem sinks JTB as we're using it in this thread, you're going to have to put forward an argument for that claim. And you can't, because it's irrelevant. Even insofar as it is a problem for JTB, it's a problem for an aspect of JTB that has nothing to do with the issues of empiricism and confidence that we're talking about here. Do you disagree that it's irrelevant? Okay, then show me how it's relevant.
Your concern about dreams runs through the same analysis. Given the general reliability of your senses, you are justified in believing that what you perceive is real. If you are in fact dreaming, the belief is justified but false, and you do not have knowledge. But if you're not dreaming, the belief is justified and true, and you do have knowledge. In short, the possibility that you're dreaming doesn't mean you can't have knowledge -- it only means you might not have knowledge. Is this a perfect situation? No, of course not. But as I keep reminding you, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Our knowledge is good enough to get stuff done. Our lives would not be improved by sitting around moping that we're not absolutely certain what we perceive is real.
An assumption is a belief. You believe it. Your belief is justified because you've observed the sun coming up every day of your life, and everyone else you talk to or read about has observed the sun coming up every day of theirs, and the consensus scientific model of the solar system based on still more observations tells us that the sun has come up every day for the past five billion years and will continue to come up for five billion more. And we can now say with the confidence of direct observation that your belief is true, because I wrote that yesterday, it's now tomorrow, and the sun in fact came up. So you have justified true belief. You have knowledge.
Could all these observations be the result of a dream or hallucination? Yes, we can never rule out the possibility completely. This does not undermine justification, in the same way that the possibility you will win the lottery does not undermine justification in believing you won't. It would be a coincidence of the most spectacular degree for every observation you make to be consistent with living in a rules-governed physical universe when this is not the case.
Physicists don't take that possibility seriously. Like Schrödinger's Cat for quantum uncertainty, it is a deliberately absurd thought experiment used to illustrate just how incomplete our understanding of entropy is.
It does not follow that knowledge is useless when it is obtained by imperfect means. I have been arguing throughout that knowledge can be useful despite being obtained by imperfect means. You need to stop fixating on the imperfection as though it were the end of the story. It's not. Empiricism works. All your protestations of uselessness ring hollow in light of that basic fact. Rather than repeat empty denials, you need to address it.
Kant is not normally very quotable, but he does occasionally turn a poignant phrase:
“The light dove, in free flight cutting through the air the resistance of which it feels, could get the idea that it could do even better in airless space. Likewise, Plato abandoned the world of the senses because it posed so many hindrances for the understanding, and dared to go beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of pure understanding.”
Descartes concludes that the world we perceive is real and that our senses can be trusted. You may not agree with his reasoning in getting there -- I certainly don't -- but you're misrepresenting him in claiming that doubt is his conclusion.
I'm afraid you're revealing a basic misunderstanding in a couple of areas here. Firstly, confidence is not used to justify anything. Confidence is the result of justification. If a belief is justified, we may rationally be confident in it; otherwise, we should not. Secondly, the Gettier problem does not address issues of confidence or indeed any of the objections you are making. The Gettier problem explores what happens when you treat beliefs as straightforward propositions of classical logic and apply certain counterintuitive properties of conjunction and disjunction to them. That's not what we're talking about here.
You can be confident in just about anything, but empirical reasoning allows us to determine what it is rational to be confident in and what not. It is not rational, for instance, to be confident that you will win the lottery: all the evidence you observe leads to the conclusion that winning is highly improbable. But it is rational to be confident that the sun will come up tomorrow: every observation you and the rest of the human race has made is consistent with a model of the universe where that happens. So yes, you can be confident in both propositions, but the two confidences are not equivalent. You do not know you will win the lottery. You may believe it, but your belief is neither justified nor true. But you do know that the sun will come up tomorrow. Your belief is justified and true.
Um... no. "Justified true belief" is the standard (shorthand) definition of knowledge in epistemology. Yes, there are puzzles and problems in the details, as is always the case in philosophy. But if you think you've "slaughtered" it, then you've made a bona fide breakthrough. And I hate to burst your bubble, but you haven't.
(Assuming you mean "Gorsuch")
In less crazy times, Gorsuch would have been confirmed easily. (In 1986, Scalia was confirmed 98-0.) He is from everything I've seen an excellent judge and near-ideal candidate for the position in terms of qualifications, intelligence, and temperament -- honestly not the sort of person I expected Trump to nominate. Does he hold conservative political views? Yes. Of course. But that's how our democracy works. The American people decided that they wanted a conservative to be the guy picking the judges. So if the Democrats were trying to block Gorsuch simply on ideological grounds, I'd be... well, filled with a frustration of a weary and familiar sort, because it's the same thing that they tried to do to Roberts and Alito, and that the GOP tried to do to Sotomayor and Kagan, in this increasingly dysfunctional government of ours.
The stolen seat complicates matters, though. I have a lot more sympathy for Dems blocking a nominee who -- whatever his qualifications -- should never have been appointed. You never want to just let your opponent get away with a dirty trick like that. But on the other hand, that dirty trick represents yet another escalation in the dysfunction, and responding in kind makes it the new normal. I want that even less. And on practical grounds this does not seem like a smart battle to fight. What outcome do the Democrats expect here if they block Gorsuch? To see Trump re-nominate Garland, or nominate a pro-choice judge? That's never going to happen. It'd be hard for any plausible future nominee to be any better than Gorsuch, and they could easily be a lot worse. To keep the seat empty for another four years until a Democrat is in the White House? One year was outrageous enough; four would be a frank admission that the system is broken (and, of course, the Republicans could just do it back to them again). So in the end, galling as it is under the circumstances to give the Republicans what they wanted, I think the best move here is to confirm Gorsuch, take a baby step towards returning the judicial confirmation process to business as usual, and look for some less self-destructive way to make the GOP pay for their stunt.
Absolutely not. The President is the President until 12:00 PM ET on January 20th. He has all the powers of his office, including the power to appoint Supreme Court justices, and the Senate has the responsibility to review and vote on those appointments. What next? The President can't issue vetos during the last six months of a term? No executive orders in the last thirty days? No pardons for the last year and a half? If we say the President can't do something because at some point in the future there might be some other President who would do it differently, why even have a President at all?
So given all this, whatever makes you think you can't act on imperfect knowledge?
We technically didn't elect Donald Trump, we elected the people that elected him, and he required a majority of the Electoral College to be declared the victor.
Furthermore, had Trump not gotten a majority of the Electoral College, the Presidency would have been decided in the House of Representatives, where he would again have needed a majority to be declared the victor (which he would have gotten).
But you're right, the citizens didn't directly elect Merkel. They elected representatives from various parties who negotiated to create a majority coalition in Parliament. This coalition then elected Merkel. That doesn't mean as much as you seem to think, though. Like the monarch in a parliamentary monarchy, the coalition is always going to vote into the Chancellorship the leader of the plurality party. It's how that system works in practice. And the bare fact remains that of the ballots cast, only 35% were for Merkel's CDU/CSU party, which makes Trump's 46% look pretty good by comparison.
Again: the United States does not and has not ever selected the President based on the plurality of the vote. If no candidate gets an absolute majority of the Electoral College, we go to the House.
This just means the primaries are really important for determining the direction of the party. Which this election cycle ought to have amply demonstrated.
What's different if you're a single issue voter in a multiparty system? Say you vote religiously for the Pro-Life Party. Well, they're not going to get an absolute majority in parliament, so they're gonna be forming a coalition with somebody. And politics being what they are they're probably only going to be forming coalitions with parties on the right. So a vote for the Pro-Life Party is essentially a vote for a right-wing coalition that has "bundled" laissez-faire economics, nationalism, social conservatism, and other issues. Now, the relative strengths of those issues may wax and wane with the fortunes of the parties pushing them, but the same thing happens in the Republican primaries as well. This time around, for instance, the GOP decided it wasn't too interested in social conservatism or laissez-faire economics.
Sometimes parties refuse to compromise too.
In a multiparty system, you can cast your vote for a party and then see that party form a coalition with the side you did not expect. It's rare in practice, but it's possible. Imagine voting for a Green candidate and then watching the Greens join Trump's coalition. Very different situation than you yourself deciding to vote for Trump, isn't it?
[citation needed]
And in a multiparty system, Johnson and McMullin get more votes, but Trump still probably wins the plurality because he's a charismatic demagogue who can attract a lot of votes, and then forms a majority coalition with Johnson and McMullin. Yes, there are a lot of factors that contributed to Trump's win. You have yet to demonstrate how the first-past-the-post system was one of them in any predictable or systematic way.
So maybe take a step back and take an examination of your own reasoning here. Because, bluntly, all I see is sour grapes.
Walk me through the logic behind saying that big tent parties are worse echo chambers than small special-interest parties. Certainly the Communists I know who are willing to work with the Democrats are not nearly as batty as the Communists who only hang out with other Communists. Ditto Libertarians et al.
Yes, small parties have to form coalitions. Big parties are coalitions. And lest you complain that the coalitions are calcified by the two-party system, remember that Trump won by flipping traditionally Democratic states and demographics. It is as if, in a multiparty system, the Blue Collar White Guy Party defected from their traditional left-leaning coalition to form a government with the rightists. Only the decision was made at the individual level rather than the party level. Which actually seems more democratic to me.