This was a powerful discussion and explanation on the state of our country and the world during the insane last years. It was appreciated that input on the future and going forward was addressed. Thank you to all! Please listen to all discussions at Jeffrey Tucker’s Brownstone Institute Conference.
A very interesting conversation. It was encouraging to hear that the way out of mass formation psychosis is speaking the truth. I am noticing that more people are speaking the truth out loud. A good example is many admitting to me they were voting for Trump, even though they did not know my politics. I have read both The New Abnormal and The Psychology of Totalitarianism, and they both helped me confirm my opinions. In other words, gave me background so I understood better why others didn’t see what I felt was the truth. Thank you.
The recognition that scientism (roughly speaking, the view that all knowledge arises from the methods of the experimental sciences; also known as positivism) is in error doesn't imply that alternative methods for acquiring knowledge have to be irrational.
Apart from the logical inductions of controlled experiments (i.e. _a posteriori_ truths), man's rational faculties also generalize about the world through conceptualization (the attribution of particular meanings derived from perceptual differentia to words, leading to analytic _a priori_ truths) and the application of _reductio ad absurdum_ inferences given the existence of meaningful discourse (the evidence for which is implicit in every conversation among rational beings; leading to synthetic _a priori_ truths).
The flaw in many strands of Enlightenment thinking was the emergence of a blanket rejection of synthetic _a priori_ reasoning by contemporary empiricists, largely motivated by a revival of certain arguments of ancient Skepticism coupled to the obvious implausibility of many of the _a priori_ constructs of the Rationalists. This stands in contrast to the views of ancient empiricists/mechanists/materialists who, unlike their Enlightenment counterparts, had developed an arsenal of objections to Skepticism and were not shy about justifying as well as asserting the existence of self-evident truths.
The emergence of Postivism is to blame for serious problems in other areas of philosophy (e.g. ethics) and in other sciences too, notably in psychology and in the social sciences. Those who blindly champion the methods of the controlled experimentation to the exclusion of all else can't make rigorous experimental inductions using observations of holistic mental states--such states can only be directly observed within oneself via introspection and indirectly observed in others via perceptions of their words, body language, and actions, making them unsuitable for comparative measurements and for construction of experimental control variables by a researcher.
Once one recognizes that a genuine empiricism is not in conflict with our common sense understanding of innate human motivations nor with one's strictly personal experiences of one's own feelings, and that rationality provides other methods of generalization than what comes out of a laboratory, the technocratic pretensions of positivist central planners must be dismissed as an irrational conceit. If one examines the history of Enlightenment philosophy a bit more closely, the Positivist degeneration of empiricism was by no means inevitable. For example, one of the most strident champions of atheism, materialism, etc., the Baron d'Holbach, was also a champion of a natural system of ethics that put the happiness of autonomous individuals first, reflecting a revival of similar ancient Greek ethical doctrines.
This was a powerful discussion and explanation on the state of our country and the world during the insane last years. It was appreciated that input on the future and going forward was addressed. Thank you to all! Please listen to all discussions at Jeffrey Tucker’s Brownstone Institute Conference.
A very interesting conversation. It was encouraging to hear that the way out of mass formation psychosis is speaking the truth. I am noticing that more people are speaking the truth out loud. A good example is many admitting to me they were voting for Trump, even though they did not know my politics. I have read both The New Abnormal and The Psychology of Totalitarianism, and they both helped me confirm my opinions. In other words, gave me background so I understood better why others didn’t see what I felt was the truth. Thank you.
The recognition that scientism (roughly speaking, the view that all knowledge arises from the methods of the experimental sciences; also known as positivism) is in error doesn't imply that alternative methods for acquiring knowledge have to be irrational.
Apart from the logical inductions of controlled experiments (i.e. _a posteriori_ truths), man's rational faculties also generalize about the world through conceptualization (the attribution of particular meanings derived from perceptual differentia to words, leading to analytic _a priori_ truths) and the application of _reductio ad absurdum_ inferences given the existence of meaningful discourse (the evidence for which is implicit in every conversation among rational beings; leading to synthetic _a priori_ truths).
The flaw in many strands of Enlightenment thinking was the emergence of a blanket rejection of synthetic _a priori_ reasoning by contemporary empiricists, largely motivated by a revival of certain arguments of ancient Skepticism coupled to the obvious implausibility of many of the _a priori_ constructs of the Rationalists. This stands in contrast to the views of ancient empiricists/mechanists/materialists who, unlike their Enlightenment counterparts, had developed an arsenal of objections to Skepticism and were not shy about justifying as well as asserting the existence of self-evident truths.
The emergence of Postivism is to blame for serious problems in other areas of philosophy (e.g. ethics) and in other sciences too, notably in psychology and in the social sciences. Those who blindly champion the methods of the controlled experimentation to the exclusion of all else can't make rigorous experimental inductions using observations of holistic mental states--such states can only be directly observed within oneself via introspection and indirectly observed in others via perceptions of their words, body language, and actions, making them unsuitable for comparative measurements and for construction of experimental control variables by a researcher.
Once one recognizes that a genuine empiricism is not in conflict with our common sense understanding of innate human motivations nor with one's strictly personal experiences of one's own feelings, and that rationality provides other methods of generalization than what comes out of a laboratory, the technocratic pretensions of positivist central planners must be dismissed as an irrational conceit. If one examines the history of Enlightenment philosophy a bit more closely, the Positivist degeneration of empiricism was by no means inevitable. For example, one of the most strident champions of atheism, materialism, etc., the Baron d'Holbach, was also a champion of a natural system of ethics that put the happiness of autonomous individuals first, reflecting a revival of similar ancient Greek ethical doctrines.