You went back a month to find me including the word Science as well? What's wrong with you? Are we having a debate where we try and understand each others positions and respond to them or are we trying to score cheap wins?
I'm trying to keep away from involving Science because rationalism is deeper in my mind and is a clearer thread going back to the 18th Century.
Maybe it would have been productive to mention that at an earlier point in the conversation after I repeatedly told you Burke's argument was the one you needed to answer. When you aren't interested enough in your opponents' argument to say you are ignorant about the core of it, are you even engaged in a debate?
No, he isn't pandering to religion. If you read him, you would know that. His argument isn't about religion. It is about society and the institutions of society as a whole.Steersman wrote: ↑Though it seems he was clearly pandering to the religious, to "magical thinking":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_BurkeBurke was a proponent of underpinning virtues with manners in society and of the importance of religious institutions for the moral stability and good of the state.
Am I going to join or part company on him doing something that somebody who hasn't read him says he did? This isn't a defence of Burkes entire position on everything. What's your plan, go back and find some position on Irish nationalism, or some such, that Burke held in 1880 and demand I defend that? I'm agreeing with him on a particular argument he made and that I have repeatedly restated.
When ever I state the core argument you vear off 90 degrees and start talking about something else, like whether I used the word "Science" once a month ago. It's been weeks and you still haven't responded.
No it isn't. Science is great for calculating the distance to the moon and other remarkable things. It falls apart in other areas though - the three body problem for example. Rationalism is the same. Good for some things, but you can't build a society on it. You need traditions, morality and so on that can't be justified rationally.
No. "Progressive liberalism" is a term in political science. At it's simplest, it's when you think liberalism should be imposed. The Civil Rights act, for example, would be a classic example of progressive liberalism, as would almost everything done by FDR, the plan to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. Progressivism requires a big, centralised, bureaucratic state to implement and enforce these liberal solutions. That is what I'm against.
The French enlightenment mode of thinking that you are using to argue for normalising prostitutes being school teachers is the wrong methodology.
Is social policy ever tested to find out if it was a good thing? How would you test the overall impact on society of normalising prostitutes being teaches?
The is nothing wrong with rationalism and science as tools. The issue is when you try and make society rational. It's like trying to solve the three body problem. Again, for the umpteenth time of asking..... how in principle would one measure the long term impact of normalizing prostitutes being teachers.
I haven't said that either. I hope this is you trolling again. If not, do you actually understand anything about the position of the people wanting to call men in dresses "women". Normalised in sociology just means that it is regarded as a natural thing not worth remarking on. Billy's teacher being a prostitute is no more remarkable than that she has brown hair, or likes to knit. That knitting is normalised does not mean every single person knits all the time.Steersman wrote: ↑Where have I said anything to the effect that all school teachers should be or should have been prostitutes?fafnir wrote: ↑l As I asked you before... What test could be devised of the long term effect on society and the culture of doing things like normalising prostitutes being school teachers as you recommend, changing the popular understanding of female to include men in dresses, or the UK leaving The EU. There isn't even a single way of implementing any of those questions. We aren't Dr Strange. We can't check all the possible futures.
This is one of the words you might want to look at fixing when you rule the world. It means something quite different in mathematics. One meaning is needed, or communication will be impossible and words will mean anything anybody wants them to mean.
No. I'm arguing that it isn't possible to design an experiment to tell what the overall impact on society will be. Nor do I think it possible to predict this on purely rational grounds. One can maybe say that Western societies that go in for this tend to be on the brink of falling apart, but whether there is a causal relationship or they are symptoms of something else or it was just a coincidence really it isn't possible to say with any kind of confidence. There is always so much else going on in society. Again, if you can think of an experiment, let me know.
Badly, but of course I would think that. I have a different set of assumptions about people and society than the people pushing this.
Probably not. The traditional way of thinking about it seemed to have managed OK for a few thousand years, so I'm inclined to think there isn't anything intrinsic to it that is destructive to society.
No it isn't. The destruction of tradition's place as a guide by progressive liberalism is what allows these things to happen. Once you push tradition aside in the name of the Cult of Reason, then the question arises - who gets to decide what is reasonable? Steersman, it isn't you that gets to decide it. Trans-women being women is what happens when you build society on reason. I know, I know.... a True society based on Reason has never been tried.... On a more positive not, on past form Napoleon will soon be here. At that point the Cult of Reason ends and maybe something like your definition arises out of the ashes, who knows?
This is true of all words.Steersman wrote: ↑You really don't seem to have a clue about the logic of definitions and the principles behind them - and despite me making some effort to explain them, notably through reference to the science of taxonomy, and the concept of intensional and extensional definitions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extension ... efinitions
There's NO intrinsic meaning to the word "female" - it means whatever "we" say it means.
No, because we have as cultures developed these words and as babies learn their socially defined meanings. Old women being female is something that you learn in early childhood. Language doesn't work in the way you claim.
Sure, I've never claimed that wasn't the case. These things are developed socially and evolved through use. We don't have an Academie Francaise fixing these meanings for us. If we did, it would be riddled with SJWs and you would find it disagreed with you.
People already did. The word female has been in use for many centuries and has always included old women. The fact that some other people made up their own definition for use in another context doesn't change that. If there was a central committee deciding the meaning of words like some Kafkaesque horror, they would be SJWs and you wouldn't like what they decided.
That isn't how language works. Police don't pull people over for saying "axe" instead of "ask". These things evolve organically in society. Language is not a rationalist enlightenment project. Esperanto was, and as we see that is wildly successful and everybody loves it.
If I'm wrong, tell me what the experiment would be to determine the long term effect on a society and culture of changing the definition of female, or woman.... or normalising prostitutes being teachers. What is the experiment you have in mind?
And yet, here we are pulling down bits of society on the grounds that they aren't rational when we can't actually get at the rational underpinnings of anything.Steersman wrote: ↑Science in general - quantum mechanics in particular - is less a matter of what will always happen in a given situation, and more one of what will happen most often, or most probably, and in most similar situations. We're not omniscient - few of us in any case - so, whether we use science and rationalism or not, we still have to roll the dice, play the odds, "screw up our courage" and make a more or less educated guess. Otherwise we wouldn't even get out of bed in the morning.
The contrary position is that we haven't got a clue how all this works. There is clearly a human process for producing societies that are certainly not optimal, but seem to work. Rationally conceived societies - Revolutionary France, Revolutionary Russia, many other smaller examples seem to have had some issues. Maybe the lesson here is to see spectacular failure as a significant possibility if we try and push one of these rational, axiomatic systems of society? Let things happen bottom up more. Tolerate different states and different countries taking different approaches.
Each country is a vast collection of different ideas implemented in different ways. We can't generally know what the impact of any one idea implemented in a particular way was, or how it would play out somewhere else. We can string narratives together about the process that sound plausible, but who knows? We can look at the overall way the aggregate of that is going, and say "something is rotten in California", say. The more widespread that view is, the more California is undermined and the more other places are strengthened. An invisible hand system. That breaks down if you impose one world view top down on everybody.
Sure. What I was objecting to was your wish to normalise prostitutes being teachers. That feels like a San Francisco kind of idea. San Francisco seems to be a shit hole that is aching to decriminalise crime. I think an idea smelling of San Francisco is reason enough to be highly suspicious of it.
