Where there is no unqualified reproducible outcome to a method of inquiry, even success or failure do not necessitate convergence. I fork from your project. You succeed, I fail. Do I have to agree you found a truth while I chased a lie and merge back with you, shamefaced? Hell no
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We can both make up accounts and stay on our forks.
Even death is not a definitive resolution. I can go to my grave convinced I found the truth despite failing and that you’ve built success upon a lie that just hasn’t caught up with you yet.
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Now the consensus has unraveled further. There isn’t even loose agreement on legitimate methods of inquiry. We’re off ex-post legibilized bureaucratized “scientific method” as a gold standard.
This is also fine, as far as I’m concerned. Methodological anarchy ftw.
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If you’re not solving for convergence anyway, and various degrees of exit are a legit option, do you even need agreement on methods? Nothing of consequence rests on people agreeing on conscious methods of inquiry, 90% of the time. Life is not a science. Why enforce a standard?
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I am not surprised left and right versions of enlightenment convergentism are good evil twins. A sufficiently classical liberal is indistinguishable from a fascist. A sufficiently clueless progressive is indistinguishable from a Stalinist. The culture war is among convergentists.
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It is 1760 vs 1850. Neither is postmodern. The postmodern resolution to the culture war would beceverybody declaring “happy to be misunderstood” and going their own way, trying to figure out solutions to material conflicts that take disengagement as a first principle.
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Divergentism is NOT centrism. It is epistemic exit via willingness to be misunderstood.
It is similar to “courage to be disliked” except without courage as a default. You just go away to where being disliked is irrelevant.
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Maybe I'm still stuck in enlightenment thinking but when decisions need to be made and any conclusion is a choice with consequences, doesn't this effectively amount to might makes right? When we have to make a choice, what do we default to amidst divergence?
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Why do you need defaults. Fine if you actually want one, go for it. But most decisions aren’t conflicts over scarce resources where might is fight us even relevant. Where it is, it generally prevails anyway.
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It does but I think where we have shared norms that privilege reason, facts, and evidence, the balance of power tips in favour of the ideas those things favour. When a decision is shared (as with most political decisions) that seems helpful.
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I don’t agree with this at all. Mostly it’s been a case of the mighty reasonably agreeing among themselves that they’re right, and delegitimizing other modes as “unreasonable” or “unscientific”
Reason has mostly allied with power, not served as an alternative to it
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Fair. I don't know how to test whether you're more right or I am, so I guess we just diverge 😉
The delegitimizing itself was a Darwinian result of "other methods" causing both suffering and death compared with scientific method. That's how all things occur. People who use crystals to cure cancer die. So we shame and punish those claiming that method is valid.
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