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Knowledge is social and requires a moral system

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  How much do we know?  And how do we know it is true? The things that we know about turn out to be the things we are most familiar with: the state of our bodies, our families, our living arrangements,  our friends,  our pastimes, our communities, and so on. It’s obvious that no one person knows everything. Since no one individual knows everything, every person depends on many others to get to know more than what they themselves are familiar with. In getting to know, we observe, practice, ask around, take classes, read books, consult Wikipedia, etc.  Every way we come to know outside our own observations and practice involves other people doing the learning or passing on the knowledge to others, who pass it on to others.  Knowledge, therefore, is like a continually developing awareness of reality that expands outward through human social networks. Perhaps the most important characteristic of human knowledge is that it is highly sharable. Nowadays the scale ...
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Knowledge, Trust, and Plato's "Republic"

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 How do we know that what others tell us is true?  There can be times when it’s in another person’s interest to either conceal the truth or to lie, or, a person could simply be wrong about what they say.  The thing is, we do trust people, and we commonly assume that people are telling the truth unless we see that they have strong reasons not to.   Normal people don’t lie all the time.  Lying all the time is pathological.  Authoritarians like Hitler, Putin, and Trump seem to lie so easily that it creates a kind of fog of confusion and amorality surrounding them. But ordinarily we don’t assume that the representatives of institutions and government are lying to us unless we come to expect this sort of deception as a matter of course.  For much of the last thirty years Russian  propaganda and closely related right -wing propaganda from the United States has been quite effective in undermining many people’s respect for and trust in official authority....
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Knowledge is Cooperative, and what that implies

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               Knowledge is Social and Requires a Moral System How much do we know?  And how do we know it is true? The things that we know about turn out to be the things we are most familiar with: the state of our bodies, our families, our living arrangements,  our friends,  our pastimes, our communities, and so on. It’s obvious that no one person knows everything. Since no one individual knows everything, every person depends on many others to get to know more than what they themselves are familiar with. In getting to know, we observe, practice, ask around, take classes, read books, consult Wikipedia, etc.  Every way we come to know outside our own observations and practice involves other people doing the learning or passing on the knowledge to others, who pass it on to others.  Knowledge, therefore, is like a continually developing awareness of reality that expands outward through human social networks. Perhaps the mos...
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Kirk Versus Socrates

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 Charlie Kirk loved verbal sparring.  He made it into a career.  In that sense he reminds me a tiny bit of Socrates, who also loved verbal sparring.  But there was and is a vital difference.  Socrates wanted people to participate in argument so that they could understand important ideas better.  When he argued with someone, he would help that person see the implications of their own ideas and how they were sometimes self-contradictory. As handed down by his most famous student, Plato, we have some of Socrates “Dialogues”.  An interesting thing about these dialogues is that they often end in something called “aporia” .  Aporia means an impasse or stalemate.  Nobody “wins” the argument.  The point with Socratean dialogue was to start the process of inquiry, not to finish it.  That’s not what Charlie Kirk was doing.  Charlie Kirk was using argument as a display of power, as a way of showing dominance over his sparring opponents....
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Is Deference the Basis of Morality?

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 Is deference to authority the basis for morality?  According to Christian doctrine, the “original sin”was disobedience, which is what led to the first humans being separated from God and ejected from paradise. The Bible tells us that  at first God planted a tree of knowledge in the middle of the  garden of Eden and then forbade the humans from eating its fruits.  Here we have the very first test of obedience, the kind  where children are given access to an attractive goody but are expressly forbidden from partaking, in order to see whether they have the self-discipline to obey authority.  Apparently, Adam and Eve failed the first test, hence the idea of “original sin”.   Note that later in the Bible, one of the “ten commandments”  is “Honour your father and mother”.   Put this way, deference to a parent’s authority appears to be a human universal.  Indeed, as the Psychologist Jean Piaget showed, all young children recogni...
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Mind Over Matter

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 What is the mind?  And how is it different from the brain?  The difference between mind and matter has been an  ongoing philosophical topic since the ancient Greeks.  The mind is something subjective, subject to our passions.  It’s not a thing, but our self-reflecting ongoing experience that is about things and about ourselves. It can focus on what is possible, what happened before, what might happen, and what should happen, whereas the brain is a thing, a physical organ that is none of the above.  We only need be conscious of our brain if it affects our mind when something goes wrong, as, when we get hit on the head or we have a stroke.  But that’s not the whole story because it is obvious that brains are necessary for our minds to function at all . The existence of the brain doesn’t explain what’s going on in our mind, because the mind is “about” things, it “contains”  thoughts and sensations which together have meaning for us and refer bo...
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Faith should never be imposed, but Morality is obligatory

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  People moralize when they use morality as a weapon against people they disagree with.  Some principles are in dispute:  is homosexuality wrong?  We can obviously disagree about this.  Many, if not most people, see morality through the lens of religious belief.   Although the Bible has some prohibitions of homosexual behaviour, it also has prohibitions against wearing fibres mixing wool and linen together.  And like mixing fibres together,  homosexuality is not a major theme of the  holy scriptures.  It isn’t one of the ten commandments.  Jesus never mentions it, although Paul condemns certain kinds of behaviour.  It’s not really a thing in the Bible. You can go through the whole Bible and you will find very little about homosexuality.  It is definitely not an important Biblical theme. Nowadays there is a strong feeling among many of us that homosexuality doesn’t do any harm, unless by harm you mean ruining a parent’s exp...
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