Philosophy is becoming rather irritating.

Discussion in 'Ethics, Morality, & Justice' started by Crcata, Apr 8, 2016.

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Do you prefer Common Sense or Philosophy?

  1. Common Sense

  2. Philosophy

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  1. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    I dont have the time or the patience to address every point at the moment.

    But overall I can agree with you that my biggest issue is with debating tactics more so than philosophy, however it is through philosophy that a lot of the debating tactics and round-about arguments are born. And it is alot of "philosophers" that use these tactics.

    But thats also what I have clarified that its with the extremes that philosophical debate is taken to where I take most issue.
     
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  3. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Justifying something logically is how something becomes logical. Something becomes common sense when most people believe it to be true. Two entirely different things.
     
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  5. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    And how do most people learn something to be true? Because it logical and makes sense, therefore they know.

    Thats how we dont have to do things in order to know the outcome.

    You are objectively wrong here. It is clear that you just want to "win" the argument instead of actually come to a reasonable conclusion. But I'll take this as far as you need it to go.

    And honestly, the further this goes the more I have proved my point. You are so hung up on the exact meaning of different words that it hinders you from going any further in discussion or the search for truth.
     
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  7. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    no..most people believe something to be true because that's what they are taught to believe by their culture and/or family. That's why we have religion, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, bigotry, etc.
     
  8. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    That does not in any way prove your point or disprove mine! You are a master of deflection.

    The FACT of the matter still is, that when something is logical, and makes sense, it becomes known to many = common sense.

    You could also add in there something along the lines of "doesn't require any further extensive testing or observation to determine". Or however you want to word it.
     
  9. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    No it doesn't. You can be totally logical and not agree with the majority view of the people. Especially is this true on moral issues. There was a time when gay people were viewed as mentally ill and sent to asylums. That was the common sense morality of the day. But that was never logical at all. And over decades it has become empirically disproven.

    "Common sense is the collection of prejudices we gather until the age of 18."
     
  10. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    Here you go adding your own details in order to make a point that is off topic.

    Just because our opinions have changed in the past over certain topics, and not everything is common sense does not mean common sense does not exist.

    Just because something seemed logical one day and not years from then doesnt mean that common sense isn't logical.

    I've also already mentioned that the deeper you go into a subject the less common sense exists, so it in most broadest terms (which is where I have stated I am coming from multiple times) something that is logical and reasonable, becomes known as truth to many = common sense. IE. Dont breath water. Killing for sake of killing is wrong. Bashing your head with a lamp will hurt. Etc etc etc. All of these examples are logical and make sense, and are known to almost all. = Common sense.

    Once again, you are objectively wrong.
     
  11. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    I just gave you an example of how common sense morality has been wrong in the past. So you have no basis for saying it is always logically validated. None whatsoever. Common sense merely expresses the general wisdom of a certain time or culture. There is nothing necessarily logical about it. BTW, did you know logic is part of philosophy? So basically by arguing that common sense must be supported by logic, you admit the importance of philosophical thought in deciding moral issues. Common sense as such is not enough.
     
  12. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    I absolutely do! You are going far outside of the realm of "broadest terms" that common sense applies. You are doing it purposefully in order to avoid admittance of defeat. But you have lost.

    Just because you can go into specifics and all the sudden common sense doesnt apply doesn't in any way show that logic and common sense dont go hand in hand. Back then I bet they knew that bashing your skull in would in fact kill them. I wonder why?

    So incase you didn't notice, your example was rubbish. You quite literally dont even know what you are arguing anymore. But thats philosophy for ya!
     
  13. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    It is all about winning here for you isn't it. Backpeddling and shifting claims and equivocating for 5 pages now under the pretense of asking a sincere question. You didn't want an answer to a question. You only wanted to disparage philosophy and elevate common sense as some new infallible oracle for deciding what is right. But in fact you have failed miserably. I leave you to your own cognitive dissonance.
     
  14. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    I would accept an answer that made sense, but none of yours do at all. Anytime you are confronted with reason and logic you just pretend not to know the definition of a word.

    You really are hardly different than knuckle draggers whom claim "I am right because I can beat you up". You change the wording a little for "I am right because you cannot prove me wrong" because you will never even except basic definitions of words. You cant even prove yourself right, but I guess its ok with you.

    My stance has been the same since the beginning and has not once changed, you just keep putting on your glasses and only seeing what you want to see in order to formulate an argument you dont have.

    So yes, you are unable to combat reason and logic without circular arguments that make no sense, so you are leaving. I'm glad to see some progress has been made. Make a habit out of this (leaving when confronted with better reasoning) and you will gradually improve over time.
     
    Last edited: Apr 12, 2016
  15. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    Overall though this thread has proved me right. 5 Pages of arguing over the meaning of words. Exactly why philosophy has yet to make any progress.
     
  16. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Speaking of Uselessness (Part the First)

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    We might similarly suggest that economics is being used by otherwise uneducated people to claim themselves educated while attempting to justify theft and other injustice. In this context, philosophy is an easy target precisely because people believe it does nothing, or serves no purpose. But much like psychology, pretty much everyone philosohizes regardless of whether or not they accept, appreciate, or believe in philosophy.

    In its most basic functions, philosophy describes perception and knowledge according to more or less formalized schema. Once upon a time, this was fairly easy to see; later iterations are more occulted. In Greece philosophy lent to the identification of logic and mathematics. Those who suggest philosophy does nothing other than ask questions we already know the answer to are, in fact, exactly incorrect; many of the answers we might assert, say, in relation to right and wrong, or good and bad, are derived philosophically. Indeed, many of the "truths" people accept in such a fashion we might describe as "taking for granted" are purely philosophical; this part is important, as any time one might make a political argument, one engages in philosophy.

    Consider the concept of us/them; history often seems a recording of detritus in the wake of a perpetual human struggle with the dualism. In the fiction of Steven Brust, this concept becomes very nearly a running gag between two species (H. sapiens and, unofficially, H. elvin) that both use the word "human" to describe themselves; it is strange to reflect how easily one can become accustomed to this, and not simply in the dialogue but also, in later stories, maintaining context through diverse narrators. At the core of the joke, of course, is the long-observed separation of us and them.

    Many learn along the way that the word "barbarian" comes from "barbaros", which in turn means approximately, "people who sound funny", or, perhaps slightly more accurately, referred once upon a time to those who did not speak Greek. Functionally speaking, there was the "us" that speaks a common language―a superficial identifier of common cause―and "them", the "barbarians".

    There are many ways in which human beings do this. Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, cynically but, in function, seemingly correctly, asserted that there are two kinds of people in the world, human beings and women, and when women try to be human beings they are accused of trying to act like men. Some really disdain perceived implications, but even in the twenty-first century it seems rather quite obvious. In American society, for instance, we have a weird circumstance afoot in which people functionally and implicitly―and, in many cases, if given the opportunity, explicitly―refuse to acknowledge that women are human beings. And in picking out justifications, these arguments inevitably spill into weird comparisons that dehumanize women. Consider the American anti-abortion crowd, at no time are people to acknowledge the humanity and human rights of women; doing so makes it much harder to tamper with philosophy in order to achieve what these people want. We do the same thing discussing health care in general; "women's health" is often reserved not as part of her human condition, but, rather, as a comparison to "health care", which in function means "men's health".

    Which leads to a very interesting exploitation of philosophy: Legislation, functionally, is derived in part from ontology; some would, therefore, legislate ontology in order to derive legislation therefrom.

    And the whole point of that stunt is to evade the humanity and human rights of women.

    But the underlying sleight, the exclusion of women from humanity, persists throughout the human endeavor, taking many forms more or less obvious, and more or less destructive, but at their root they are all destructive. Uttar Pradesh, Alaska, Ireland; all three experience visible conflicts in their regard for the humanity of women. Uttar Pradesh is a raping field; while we in the U.S. often congratulate ourselves on our civility, we have a persistent human rights crisis in our society and Alaska is in its own way―having a rape rate tenfold the rest of the U.S.―is emblematic of certain aspects; and though Ireland has gone out of its way in the past to constitutionally protect motherhood, and elected female heads of state well before we Americans could properly imagine doing such a thing, their society is occasionally wracked by guilt and self-loathing when the toll, another innocent woman dead because doctors were expected to subordinate her life to that of a fetus they couldn't save, is witnessed, yet when they stage their opportunities to untie that particular knot in their society they repeatedly refuse. We Americans, of course, have actually topped our Irish friends, because we have an argument afoot in this country about whether a woman is allowed to die without societal permission. Of course, that's Texas, which itself is emblematic by its own aspects of misogyny and, more generally, the us/them dualism. Somewhat obscure, it involves a bill stalled in the legislature and a county-level Republican chairman preparing to purge his corner of the party in such a manner that would, by no particularly surprising coincidence, help advance the bill, a "religious-freedom" construct ostensibly targeting gays, but including provisions allowing state employees to deliberately withhold medical access from sexually abused minor females as a matter of personal conscience.

    The United States are also a nation that dehumanizes dark skin; we kicked off the Republic that way, with the infamous Three-Fifths Rule specifically counting dark skin as three-fifths of a person, in order to protect the rights of white male taxpayers. Yes, that's what American political centrism wins us, and we only had to fight a war to undo it.

    In the modern era we might look to Guantanamo, one of our truly Great Mistakes. The legal rationale has always been tenuous, and has specifically sought ways to exclude these prisoners from humanity. Aspects of this creep into mundane American society as well. With Guantanamo, the object was to keep the suspects out of the States where they would be covered by the Equal Protection Clause of Amendment Fourteen; while we didn't have an officially declared war, though, we used the excuse of being at war to suspend Due Process under Amendment V.

    It is easy enough to denounce "otherwise uneducated people to claim themselves to be educated or, 'intellectuals' or 'deep thinkers' and in many cases to parade that around as truth", but we should not allow them to define philosophy. To wit, there is a notion of philosophy in the abstract, and also a particular question of how philosophy is applied. While in nature, male derives from female, many myths often declared and accepted as truth turn this formulation on its head. There is the Book of Genesis, for instance, in which woman is literally manufactured from a man's sacrifice of part of his body; Jomo Kenyatta, in Facing Mt. Kenya, recorded a tribal belief that women were once stewards endowed by the gods, but fell from grace for their own decadence, and that, in turn, is why men are and should be in charge. These little twists emerge in myth all through the human endeavor, and thus become philosophical presuppositions.

    ―End Part I―
     
  17. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Speaking of Uselessness (Continued; Part the Second)

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    Catholicism, for instance, includes the apex of Christian philosophy; it is incredibly tight work, devised and retained over millennia, but only works if we accept a priori a number of presumptions that cannot be observed or otherwise established true. Following the historical record, we would find it unsurprising that subsequent dialectics result in the measurement of a woman's humanity and human rights as some manner of derivation from men's. The American version includes denunciations of reproductive health care as extraneous because some of those services are unique to women, and thus alien to men. We also have this notion cynically denounced as the Guardians of Female Chastity, which really is fairly common, and not just in the United States. But it really is astounding how far societies will go to denounce women for being raped.

    And these nightmares are derived from philosophical constructions. Say what we will about charlatans parading false truths, but the answer to those sleights is also philosophical. Consider basic logic: If/then.

    If human, then human rights. This is an abstract proposition. It also happens to be nearly inevitable, because otherwise civilized society becomes an exercise in sadism, a fool's errand in pursuit of primacy, a forestalling of inevitability for the sake of creating and enjoying cruelty. From the moment humans conceived of rights it became inevitable that we should seek equality―no right is anything but arbitrary without equality.

    Philosophy has served multiple roles in history. At its most basic level, it is the shape of how we perceive and quantify truth. More superficial according to contemporary issues, we might simply note that science would not exist without philosophy. Once upon a time this was as evident as the literary record itself; mathematics and science derived directly from philosophy. Fast-forward a couple millennia, and we find science fiction and fantasy among the literary tools used to explore potentials beyond the immediately applicable.

    We might look to the future, and when the day comes pretend we are surprised by the ethical challenges presented by cloning, artificial intelligence, and human rights in a context regarding diverse sentient species. Or we can acknowledge what many already postulate, that science fiction and fantasy are proving gorunds for philosophical propositions.

    Here's a question straight out of science fiction: What are Motoko Kusanagi's rights? This is a philosophical question, as we have no present equivalent of the Major. Someday, though, we will. And plenty who reject philosophy are welcome to pretend surprise, but they will be among those left behind; the discourse can only hold itself back for the sake of the wilfully ignorant for so long.

    There are plenty in history who have literally denounced psychology as some manner of demonic inspiration, yet even those will attempt basic psychological manipulation. Nor should we be surprised when those people are unprepared to deal with transformations of public attitude. It was all of two weeks ago, for instance, that I had the strangest discussion with my daughter's maternal grandfather, a so-called "Christian" who frets way too much about other people's sex lives. Of late he's been fretting about bathroom bills, because, "Any man can walk into a woman's restroom and claim he has the right to be there". And when it was pointed out that only people who think like him would do that―if/then―the proposition quite literally defied his comprehension. That is, if he is the pervert, then the problem is not his own perversion but everyone else,.

    Regardless of its reckless construction, this outcome is determined philosophically, and its answer is also philosophical.

    I know how I'll construct the accusation if he ever hurts my daughter.

    How about you? When evil touches a person you know, how do you define evil?

    It's a philosophical construction, which means you're out in the cold. If philosophy has no use, then you have no philosophical route to construct a useful indictment of wrongdoing.

    And this is well and fine if you're one of those admirable people who is so evolved as to abandon petty human concerns like giving a damn, but for the rest of us trapped in this living hell, philosophy has its uses.

    ―Fin―
     
  18. BWE1 Rulers are for measuring. Registered Senior Member

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    Have you read Popper? You are right that you have a cartoon version. Anyway, it was David Hume what woke me from my dogmatic slumber. Reason is and must be a slave to the passions.
     
  19. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    You may not have kept up with the rest of the thread but I have addressed more specifically my issues, as it really isn't with philosophy in general but the extremes in which many apply it today.
     
  20. BWE1 Rulers are for measuring. Registered Senior Member

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    :blush:

    I only got as far as the post I quoted. Then I got distracted by a shiny thing. Sorry. I intended to keep reading. I agree it can be misused or assumed to grant an unwarranted authority on speculative matters though. But Popper has a special place in my heart. I felt honor-bound to rise to his defense. Even though he is, admittedly, dead and doesn't care.
     
  21. Crcata Registered Senior Member

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    Hahaha its all good

    To sum up the thread for you.

    I admitted that my initial attack on philosophy was a bit much and unwarranted.

    Reestablished I simply dislike it being pressed to ridiculous extremes. And pointed out how our language simply doesn't work in those extremes.


    It was pointed out, with some truth, alot of my dislike is towards debate tactics and not really philosophy.

    Then MR came in and ruined an otherwise decent discussion.
     
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  22. exchemist Valued Senior Member

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    Yes I think it was a good and fruitful discussion.....until the cranks and nitwits arrived, which is always something of a hazard here, I'm afraid.
     
  23. Yazata Valued Senior Member

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    As of post #92, before the thread inexplicably revived, you were crowing about what you imagined was your great victory. It isn't clear what you imagined that you had defeated.

    You are the one who is repeatedly using the phrase "ridiculous extremes". The idea, whatever you intend it to mean, lies at the heart of your assault on philosophy. You refuse to clarify your meaning and intentions, despite having been asked to do so repeatedly.

    You can't just announce that it's impossible to explain, suggesting that clarifying what you mean is an example of philosophical extremism that pushes our language beyond its boundaries, while leaving your words behind you like the 'Cheshire cat's grin'. Your whole attack on philosophy collapses without clarification.

    Many areas of life, such as science and the practice of law, pay great attention to what words and phrases mean (in context). Generally speaking, that's true throughout higher education, especially in more technical subjects.

    You ruined it yourself in your very first post in this thread, which I thought was badly conceived and rather trollish. Don't blame MR for the deficiencies in your own position. The blame lies squarely with you.
     
    Last edited: Apr 25, 2016
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