Suppose you admire JBP for his message about individual responsibility which has been presented in terms you find inspiring and which have helped you personally but someone else sees him in terms of epistemology - how we determine what is true - and disagrees strongly with this?
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Well, there are certainly phenomena that we cannot scientifically measure nor explain. I reckon it's unfair to be critical of those who strive their best to understand such things despite their knowledge that a scientific certainty of that they enquire about can never be achieved
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Well, I am, tho I defend their right to do it. It's the triad of postmodernism, theology and metaphysics that does this and they overlap a lot and call on the same elements of epistemology. It's fine when it remains speculative and for enjoyment or thought experiment.
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It only becomes a problem when people claim it to be knowledge and that it should influence public policy or academia. Theology has the longest history of this but feminist epistemology is the only thing I know to be getting away with it now in a way which affects wider society.
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Humility in the face of the non-empirical does seem to me a legitimate cornerstone of both public policy and academic study. The problem of course is when ppl make claims in one realm of truth where it belongs in the other.
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Sure but that doesn't take long. You can say 'We don't know everything and all knowledge is provisional' and then get back to focusing on what we can know and better and worse ways to do that. PoMos, theologians & metaphysicians tend to prefer to dwell in the fog of not-knowing
End of conversation
New conversation -
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I’d agree with perhaps one caveat: the absence of empirical proof for the supernatural so often cited by atheists should not be used as a club for criticizing methods of acting in the world. Or if it is, it has just as much moral weight or lack thereof as its antithesis.
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In what way? I don't care if people want to touch their forehead to the ground multiple times in worship of something there's no evidence of. We might laugh. But they can also criticise us not doing that.
End of conversation
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I did address it a bit here but the problem of how to supply human needs for emotionally resonant metanarratives & something akin to spirituality without losing empirical truth & reason will probably always be with us. We are stupid apes.