It does not matter if those “reasons” are signaling, privilege, hegemony, or having an invisible devil on your shoulder whispering into your bloody ear: to impugn someone else’s epistemology entirely at the meta-level without saying a thing against their object-level claims is anti-epistemology.
Ignoring reasons why someone believes what they believe is not good epistemology.
Learn first to explicitly identify yourself with a political “tribe”, and next to consider political ideas individually, as questions of fact and value subject to investigation via epistemology and moral epistemology, rather than treating politics as “tribal”.
I don’t think explicitly identifying yourself with one tribe is a good idea. I personally don’t map to any specific political tribe. I might label myself as having a hacker ideology and use that as an argument that I oppose French secularism but I would guess that most people on LW wouldn’t see the connection.
In school we had a philosophy course and our teacher told us that wanting to name tribes is a very American thing. German culture doesn’t have the same value of signalling tribal affiliation.
I remember Berlin’s SPD Finance senator Sarrazin being asked whether he’s in the wrong party after he wrote his book critising the lower social classes. He answered that one doesn’t change his poltiical party like one’s clothing.
He had his post because he was actually good at his job.
As far as the meaning of the word democracy goes I like the way Yes, Minister explains British Demorcracy. It doesn’t have much to do with the American idea of political tribalism.
It does not matter if those “reasons” are signaling, privilege, hegemony, or having an invisible devil on your shoulder whispering into your bloody ear: to impugn someone else’s epistemology entirely at the meta-level without saying a thing against their object-level claims is anti-epistemology.
Ignoring reasons why someone believes what they believe is not good epistemology.
It depends.
If I understand all of someone’s logical arguments for believing what they believe, and I have the knowledge and processing power needed to evaluate those arguments, and I want to know whether the belief is correct, I should ignore all of the non-logical reasons why they believe what they believe. Argument screens off authority, which means it also screens off non-authority and indeed anti-authority.
If someone tells me the sun’s shining, and I look outside and see the sun’s shining, it doesn’t matter if the person told me the sun’s shining because they’re trying to signal something else; it doesn’t matter if they’re privileged; it doesn’t matter if they’re a hegemon; it doesn’t matter if they have an invisible devil on their ear. I can see for myself that they’re correct. The process that generated the claim has been rendered utterly irrelevant.
But of course I’ve made some assumptions there which are routinely false: I often don’t have the knowledge or processing power needed to evaluate all of someone’s arguments, and sometimes don’t even know the arguments for a belief. If so, it’s legitimate to use what I know about the belief-generating process as a cognitive shortcut to judge the belief. And this is true frequently enough that you have a good point, too: in real life we don’t have time to do a full-blown evaluation of the belief network supporting a claim, in which case the “reasons why someone believes what they believe” can be useful (even important) evidence. Whether you are correct or eli_sennesh is correct is situation-dependent.
If someone tells me the sun’s shining, and I look outside and see the sun’s shining, it doesn’t matter if the person told me the sun’s shining because they’re trying to signal something else; it doesn’t matter if they’re privileged; it doesn’t matter if they’re a hegemon; it doesn’t matter if they have an invisible devil on their ear. I can see for myself that they’re correct.
A person can mention that the sun is shining because they seek a small talk topic with little chance of offense.
They can also say the sun is shinning to indicate that the dislike being indoors at the moment.
If you only focus on the fact that the sun is indeed shining you might miss most of the communicated information.
That’s true, some conversations are not actually about what they’re denotatively about. I didn’t think eli_sennesh was talking about such mundane small talk, though.
If I understand all of someone’s logical arguments for believing what they believe, and I have the knowledge and processing power needed to evaluate those arguments,
Outside of math you also need the relevant evidence, i.e., observations, which requires you to trust that they have been accurately reported.
Ignoring reasons why someone believes what they believe is not good epistemology.
I don’t think explicitly identifying yourself with one tribe is a good idea. I personally don’t map to any specific political tribe. I might label myself as having a hacker ideology and use that as an argument that I oppose French secularism but I would guess that most people on LW wouldn’t see the connection.
In school we had a philosophy course and our teacher told us that wanting to name tribes is a very American thing. German culture doesn’t have the same value of signalling tribal affiliation.
I remember Berlin’s SPD Finance senator Sarrazin being asked whether he’s in the wrong party after he wrote his book critising the lower social classes. He answered that one doesn’t change his poltiical party like one’s clothing. He had his post because he was actually good at his job.
As far as the meaning of the word democracy goes I like the way Yes, Minister explains British Demorcracy. It doesn’t have much to do with the American idea of political tribalism.
It depends.
If I understand all of someone’s logical arguments for believing what they believe, and I have the knowledge and processing power needed to evaluate those arguments, and I want to know whether the belief is correct, I should ignore all of the non-logical reasons why they believe what they believe. Argument screens off authority, which means it also screens off non-authority and indeed anti-authority.
If someone tells me the sun’s shining, and I look outside and see the sun’s shining, it doesn’t matter if the person told me the sun’s shining because they’re trying to signal something else; it doesn’t matter if they’re privileged; it doesn’t matter if they’re a hegemon; it doesn’t matter if they have an invisible devil on their ear. I can see for myself that they’re correct. The process that generated the claim has been rendered utterly irrelevant.
But of course I’ve made some assumptions there which are routinely false: I often don’t have the knowledge or processing power needed to evaluate all of someone’s arguments, and sometimes don’t even know the arguments for a belief. If so, it’s legitimate to use what I know about the belief-generating process as a cognitive shortcut to judge the belief. And this is true frequently enough that you have a good point, too: in real life we don’t have time to do a full-blown evaluation of the belief network supporting a claim, in which case the “reasons why someone believes what they believe” can be useful (even important) evidence. Whether you are correct or eli_sennesh is correct is situation-dependent.
A person can mention that the sun is shining because they seek a small talk topic with little chance of offense.
They can also say the sun is shinning to indicate that the dislike being indoors at the moment.
If you only focus on the fact that the sun is indeed shining you might miss most of the communicated information.
That’s true, some conversations are not actually about what they’re denotatively about. I didn’t think eli_sennesh was talking about such mundane small talk, though.
Outside of math you also need the relevant evidence, i.e., observations, which requires you to trust that they have been accurately reported.
Agreed. That’s part of the “knowledge” I had in mind.
True, true, and true.