The point about the limits of knowledge is well taken (and also a familiar one around here, no?), but I’m not sure what that implies for honesty.
I’m not so sure it is a familiar point, or at least not as familiar as it should be. Maybe it’s just me, but I continue to read a strong positivist undercurrent in the expressed thinking of many rationalists even though it has Bayesian epistemology layered on top. I think of this as sort of a half measure, like saying “we can’t know things 100% for sure” but then still assuming we can use experiential data to know something about everything and the only thing in our way is gathering more data within the available time bounds. As I argue above, there are deeper-seated blind-spots that make this sort of approach impossible without first making some assumptions, like say that sense data is data about a world that exists independent of the subject (the typical scientific materialist position). I’m not opposed to making some assumptions like these since they are necessary to address epistemic circularity, but I think there is a strong tendency to forget that these assumptions are metaphysical speculation which results in weird things, like say overly valuing naive notions of honesty and truth.
Surely you would agree that a person or statement can still be more or less honest?
Given the way I eventually define honesty above, sure, but at that point I think I’ve gutted most of what people care about when they talk about honesty. To me it seems that the fact that someone would bother to talk about honesty rather than coordination is holding on to something like an unsupportable view like truth essentialism.
Is the idea that there’s nothing much to be gained by trying to be especially honest—that there’s no low-hanging fruit there?
I’d sort of say so in so far as we consider naive notions of honesty. There are hard problems around how to coordinate and how to convince others of things you want to convince them of, like perhaps that they should have high credence in the things you say, and this is sort of a reasonable reinterpretation of what people are talking about when they talk about honesty but it’s also importantly different because it abandons any attempts to use normative assumptions about truth to simplify the problem.
I’m not sure I understand—what is the claim or hypothesis that you are arguing against?
The point about the limits of knowledge is well taken (and also a familiar one around here, no?), but I’m not sure what that implies for honesty.
Surely you would agree that a person or statement can still be more or less honest?
Is the idea that there’s nothing much to be gained by trying to be especially honest—that there’s no low-hanging fruit there?
I’m not so sure it is a familiar point, or at least not as familiar as it should be. Maybe it’s just me, but I continue to read a strong positivist undercurrent in the expressed thinking of many rationalists even though it has Bayesian epistemology layered on top. I think of this as sort of a half measure, like saying “we can’t know things 100% for sure” but then still assuming we can use experiential data to know something about everything and the only thing in our way is gathering more data within the available time bounds. As I argue above, there are deeper-seated blind-spots that make this sort of approach impossible without first making some assumptions, like say that sense data is data about a world that exists independent of the subject (the typical scientific materialist position). I’m not opposed to making some assumptions like these since they are necessary to address epistemic circularity, but I think there is a strong tendency to forget that these assumptions are metaphysical speculation which results in weird things, like say overly valuing naive notions of honesty and truth.
Given the way I eventually define honesty above, sure, but at that point I think I’ve gutted most of what people care about when they talk about honesty. To me it seems that the fact that someone would bother to talk about honesty rather than coordination is holding on to something like an unsupportable view like truth essentialism.
I’d sort of say so in so far as we consider naive notions of honesty. There are hard problems around how to coordinate and how to convince others of things you want to convince them of, like perhaps that they should have high credence in the things you say, and this is sort of a reasonable reinterpretation of what people are talking about when they talk about honesty but it’s also importantly different because it abandons any attempts to use normative assumptions about truth to simplify the problem.