American Thought Leaders is releasing a 30 minute segment of this interview without a paywall at 5 pm Eastern / 2 pm Pacific today. Here’s the link on YouTube and Rumble. Enjoy!
I greatly enjoyed this conversation; you and Mattias (with the help of Jan's questions) were able to pack a lot of important content into a relatively brief program. A crucial point that should be explored further is the tendency of positivists to discount the existence of an innate human nature, and thus reject any ethical constructs derived from it.
Positivism takes this stance (and more generally a scientistic approach to the social and behavioral sciences) because internal mental phenomena can only be directly observed within oneself, making it impossible to engage in the sort of controlled experimentation that requires comparisons against experimental controls needed to perform logical inductions and comparisons against measurement standards needed to quantify the magnitudes of causal effects. If one embraces the positivist premise that controlled experiments are the only way to empirically validate generalizations, then all generalizations derived from introspective data have to be dismissed as arbitrary subjective constructs however common-sensical they may seem.
Note that this premise reflects an epistemological shortcoming of positivism, not a shortcoming specifically connected to a secularist/materialist worldview or even to strictly empiricist variants of secular materialism. One can make the case in an empiricist context (as some ancient Greek philosophers did) that experience is also the source of meaning forming the basis for analytic and for self-evident truths; generalizations that don't require subsequent testing via experimental inductions for their validation. Positivism is the result of older empiricist doctrines (as revived by Gassendi and Locke, which were not fully informed by ancient Greek doctrines) having been stunted by skeptical and rationalist attacks on the empirical bona fides of analytic and self-evident truths.
Moreover, introspective data about one's own mental states can be complemented with indirect inferences about the mental states of others via our sensory observations of them; an appeal to a common sense understanding of human nature may not have the rigor of laboratory experimentation, but it still has a basis in empirical observations of human nature even if the resulting generalizations have to be couched in qualitative terms with modal epistemic qualifiers added. As limited and "fuzzy" as such knowledge about our own psychological natures might be, it does provide insight into what is truly universal about human desires and what sorts of attitudes and virtues are necessary (even if not sufficient) for optimizing one's own personal pursuit of happiness.
I greatly enjoyed this conversation; you and Mattias (with the help of Jan's questions) were able to pack a lot of important content into a relatively brief program. A crucial point that should be explored further is the tendency of positivists to discount the existence of an innate human nature, and thus reject any ethical constructs derived from it.
Positivism takes this stance (and more generally a scientistic approach to the social and behavioral sciences) because internal mental phenomena can only be directly observed within oneself, making it impossible to engage in the sort of controlled experimentation that requires comparisons against experimental controls needed to perform logical inductions and comparisons against measurement standards needed to quantify the magnitudes of causal effects. If one embraces the positivist premise that controlled experiments are the only way to empirically validate generalizations, then all generalizations derived from introspective data have to be dismissed as arbitrary subjective constructs however common-sensical they may seem.
Note that this premise reflects an epistemological shortcoming of positivism, not a shortcoming specifically connected to a secularist/materialist worldview or even to strictly empiricist variants of secular materialism. One can make the case in an empiricist context (as some ancient Greek philosophers did) that experience is also the source of meaning forming the basis for analytic and for self-evident truths; generalizations that don't require subsequent testing via experimental inductions for their validation. Positivism is the result of older empiricist doctrines (as revived by Gassendi and Locke, which were not fully informed by ancient Greek doctrines) having been stunted by skeptical and rationalist attacks on the empirical bona fides of analytic and self-evident truths.
Moreover, introspective data about one's own mental states can be complemented with indirect inferences about the mental states of others via our sensory observations of them; an appeal to a common sense understanding of human nature may not have the rigor of laboratory experimentation, but it still has a basis in empirical observations of human nature even if the resulting generalizations have to be couched in qualitative terms with modal epistemic qualifiers added. As limited and "fuzzy" as such knowledge about our own psychological natures might be, it does provide insight into what is truly universal about human desires and what sorts of attitudes and virtues are necessary (even if not sufficient) for optimizing one's own personal pursuit of happiness.