LS Re: Keith on ???????


Keith A. Gillette (gillette@tahc.state.tx.us)
Sun, 22 Mar 1998 06:16:38 +0100


At 5:57 PM -0500 3/19/98, Donald T Palmgren wrote:
>On Wed, 18 Mar 1998, Keith A. Gillette wrote:
>> the Civil War. However, the salient point which must be understood is this:
>> It is the job of the intellect, not of society, to determine which ideas
>> are good and which are bad. Any society which represses ideas is
>> fundamentally immoral."
>
> Hmmmm...
> I'm suspicious. Societies always decide what is true.

Good to be suspicious.

Kevin pointed to a potential difficulty in MoQ, one with which I had
previously grappled: Is it moral for a society to fall for a bad idea?
While I didn't answer that question directly, I pointed to the fact that
what the MoQ really means when it says the intellectual level is on a
higher moral plane than society is this: Societies which repress ideas are
immoral, which is a different proposition.

I can see, in a limited way, how it might be the case that "societies
always decide what is true". Your explication on proof starts out well ...

> Proving is a social activity. What counts as proof changes from
>one society or era or age to another. The emperical observations of an
>objective and detatched observer processed through a rigorous scientific
>method is a social value we possess -- it has far from always been the
>method employed for proving. We value that method of proof -- others have
>not. We say ours is more acurate -- that it is better because it yields
>the truth, etc. But wait! Stop and think. How do you prove the truth
>value betwwen two systems of proof? This is why I say, we know what it
>means for F=ma to be true, but what does "Science is true!" mean? True
>how? Scientificly? That dosn't make sense. A fact is true because it is
>proven. A proof is true because it is socially accepted as the best, most
>socialable, most moral means of setteling a dispute (this is why all facts
>are moral, and since the universe is constructed of facts, this is where
>Hegel calls it "ethical substance" which is both ethical and substantial).

... but I'm afraid I don't follow it to the conclusion, though I agree with
your reasoning to a certain degree. I get lost where you talk about Hegel
and the universe consisting of facts.

My primary point in this article was that MoQ says that a society which
actively suppresses discussion of a given idea based on that society's
pre-existing beliefs is immoral. It is incumbent upon any moral society to
allow discussion (not necessarily action) on any idea. A society (maybe
"government" would be clearer here) which censors books, which prevents
people from discussing what they please, is less moral than a society which
does not. This is distinct from whether society (maybe "culture" would be
clearer here) determines which ideas are true and which are not.

I suppose it may be the case that saying "society" determines the truth or
falsehood of an idea is the most accurate way to speak. That's part of
Pirsig's point in the Mythos over Logos argument and the Cultural Immune
System. Truth *is* largely culturally determined.

However, I don't believe this implies that society unilaterally decides
what's true. Instead, I'd argue (with Pirsig) that individual intellects
determine what they believe to be true based on their cultural
conditioning, including, to an extent, the very language they use, and also
based on their experience of reality. These individual determinations of
truth, or more accurately, valuation of ideas, in turn 'determine'
society's view of a belief, forming a feedback loop. Not a closed loop,
however, otherwise Plato's Truth would still be with us. Individual
experience, even as patterned by cultural preconceptions, influences the
process.

Stop and think. If this were not the case, how would society's preferred
method of proof have changed over the eras? Start with an arbitrary
culture--Christendom. Their society thinks that experimentation is
unnecessary and we can accept truth as revealed in the bible and as
supplemented by reason where it does not discord with revelation. Somewhere
between them and us, that cultural belief changed. Now our culture, by and
large, believes that the proof of the pudding is in the tasting and we want
experimental verification. How did this change occur? If society "changed
its mind", how did it do that? "Society" was dead-set that the revealed
word of God was the never-changing eternal Truth. Now that's not the
case--multiple truths and all that. How did this happen?

Heretics, of course. It was never the case that *everyone* within society
believed in the revealed word of God. (Or that no other society's with
different viewpoints existed.) Individuals believed differently than
"society" (read: the majority of other people, or: the people who wielded
power). Eventually these different ideas spread to other minds, when the
overriding view became too limited to explain people's experience.
Individual valuations of truth eventually overrode the old consensus and
society's view changed when the majority of individual minds shifted to the
new view.

Now that's just a story about how it happened, but I honestly don't see any
other plausible explanation for the perceived difference in society's
preferred methods of proof now and then.

All for now,
Keith

______________________________________________________________________
gillette@tahc.state.tx.us -- <URL:http://www.detling.ml.org/gillette/>

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