This dude dumbed down the deep concept of moral truth for 2 separate hours and Harris was so caught up in his rigid...

who keeps posting this fag?

>semantics are beneath us
Semantics is about accuracy in meaning. I think it's very important. If you dislike analytics, philosophy isn't for you.

Why? What made this true?

>be me
>in highschool (18 no underage b&)
>jock says i never get laid
>tell him that that can't be true
>he says that it is a fact
>tell him that truth isn't as simple as that and that for me empirical truth is embedded in a larger metaphysical framework where truth claims are evaluated on their darwinian merit
>tell him that if it were the case that i never get laid i would not reproduce and that therefore my genes would die out
>tell him that my genes dying out goes against the higher darwinian principle in which the framework of science is embedded and therefore it is ultimately wrong, since the lack of survival of my genes would necessarily go against moral truth
>he says that's a bunch of bullshit and things are either true or false
>pause for about thirty seconds, consider the implications of his views, fight back a tear
>tell him that his rational empiricist perspective is highly dangerous and that that kind of thinking leads to all kinds of horrible consequences and that he should read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn so that he can see that for himself
>he says i'm still a virgin nerd
>girls laugh

kek

Isn't Harris a moral realist himself?

>>be me
>>in highschool (18 no underage b&)
Anyone who says this is underage.

>Taking a word that already exists with an established meaning and giving it your own, different, meaning.
Btw you're a pedophile. Oh that just means Veeky Forums user.

Yes. The distinction is that he is a moral naturalist.

What is that 'established meaning'?

>raves about SJWs making shit up and expecting people to accommodate them
>does the same

a (1) : being in accordance with the actual state of affairs (2) : conformable to an essential reality (3) : fully realized or fulfilled

This is what 99.9% of people agree it means

that's a pragmatic truth but not real truth

All knowledge is predicated on faith.

Prove me wrong.

Prove yourself right first.

I have faith that all knowledge is predicated on faith.

you played yourself

STEMgods - build spaceships, develop new technology, explore space, describe the world down to the subatomic elemental particles, all using fundamental methods of scientific research and impersonal language of mathematics.

Humanitiesplebs - YOU CANT KNOW THAT YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO KNOW KNOWING THE KNOWLEDGE OF KNOWTH. NIETZCHE WROTE SOMETHING IMPORTANT WHILE HIS MOM WERE MAKING TENDIES LEMME QUOTE YOU THIS

but 4 real f a m

all truth claims are based on unprovable axioms of which the radical skeptic can just deny the self-evidency of

Hypocritical old cunt. This is incredibly far up his own ideological bumhole

Yes. That's why you should always be a radical sceptic if you like winning debates.

>smug giggles
Nervous laughter?

>Btw you're a pedophile. Oh that just means Veeky Forums user.
This has always been true.

Peterson was the one going 'ha ha' nervously with his parchment throat.

I fear for his mental health desu.

>made up words

But how can it be true if the people being labelled as pedophiles kill themselves as a result? Checkmate.

FUCKING KEK SAVING THIS PASTA

I don't care at all for either of them, but Peterson got absolutely embarrassed. He couldn't at all form his argument into a coherent mass. I get his definition of truth, but he has to realize that no one else really uses the word that way. He also presents no argument against Harris's and simply rejects the 'micro' examples that completely destroy his points.

It really was shameful on his part. He came across as a big-headed philosophy undergrad. Truly, truly embarrassing performance.

>no one else uses pragmatic epistemology
His only issue is systematizing it.

i have knowledge that all faith is predicated on knowledge

prove it

>Pseud who couldn't get a job at a real university argues with a Stanford educated intellectual
It's like a toddler trying to beat up a prize fighter.

There's a difference between truth and what is true.

Truth is the phenomenon. It is the thing itself. It is action.

True is in relation to a representation. Does a model, theory, statement using language, matches with reality.

Shit bait

>stanford
not intellectual

absolutely wrong. He proved that every microexample is completely irrelevant because Harris can select all the criteria and context, thus setting up a situation that simply does not happen in the real world

>B-but what is they were great biologists, and the were morally good people, and there was absolutley nothing wrong with the lab equipment, and they had all relevant information about the dangers of smallpox but still killed half the world!

he was setting up impossibilities, every time a fair example was directed at harris he was able to expand the scope to be primarily contingent on moral truth rather than the scientific truth at the 'local' level.

Pursued far enough, it always comes back to morality. Reminded me of Tolstoy's last couple chapters in War and Peace actually

at Peterson, rather

Stanford gets a lot of shit about being an entrepreneurial university (ie, spawned google) but they do have some pretty good humanities programs as well. Like, the english department has Orgel, Greene and Hoxby to make it the Shakespearean powerhouse of anywhere east of Harvard. I've also heard from a friend their linguistics programs are top notch, but can't really judge.

Humanities as a whole is terrible. The very humanist concept of it.

Harvard is also awful.

Stop making Peterson threads.

>her

>listening to two boring assholes argue about the word truth for 2 hours.
literally why

Because they are both interesting people for different reasons.

Unfortunately they simply couldn't have a discussion and had to have a "debate" where the goal was to win.

Harris's intractable immobility was fucking cringe. An atheist literally acting like a creationist. I never thought I'd see the day.

>"The main criticism directed at me has been that once we hit this impasse, I wasn’t a gracious enough host to let the dialogue proceed to other topics. I understand this complaint (and even anticipated it during the dialogue itself). But I feared that if we moved on to discuss the validity of religious faith, the power of myth, the reality of Jungian archetypes, or any of the more ethereal topics for which Peterson has become a celebrated exponent, without first agreeing on how sane and reasonable people can differentiate fact from fantasy, we were doomed to talk past each other with every sentence."

I agree here and thought it was a reasonable position to take. A part 2 will make it worth it.

and justifying the reduction of truth to "survival" over, say, flourishing etc.

keeeek nice one user

Harris didn't directly bring this up, but the microexample of slavery would point out quite a bit of silliness in Peterson's view.

There are millions of examples you could think of that disprove Peterson's ideas.

Harris burns him big time with the inability for Peterson to 'cash in' his truth. If global society functions absurdly well and everyone is undeniably happy and everyone makes tons of money, etc. and then one day we die for any number of reasons (that could be combinations of chance, human error, assumed positive behavior with unforeseen consequences) then suddenly that renders all of the previous, lets say, 1,000,000 years of undiluted joy completely untrue and immoral.

Peterson's excuse for this would be that we didn't know the whole truth, or there was something we should have foreseen or some error in or conceptual framework. This is, frankly, retarded. It's like morally adding 1 to infinity. It's unfalsifiable because no matter what bad things happen, Peterson can say that they happened because of some untruth that is forever outside the current framework. If humanity was happy for billions and billions of years and then was wiped out by a comet, Peterson would say that our truth was wrong because it didn't include or foresee the comet. No matter what happens he will always be able to add 1 to it.

This blogpost from Harris literally spells out why a part 2 will be pointless and cringeworthy.

Sam is just going to say "But it's not scientifically true" the whole part 2 discussion if there is one, mark my words.

There's no need for a part two. I enjoy listening to Peterson's exigis but even when on his own terrain he begs the question all the time.

His view of truth begs the question pretty much. Religion is True -> Goodness is True -> Goodness is what helps us survive -> Religion Helps Us Survive bc it is Good ->Religion is True.

His argument isn't that "religion is true" anyway. That's just a red herring.

He has a Jungian view of religion which is absolutely *not* a commonly held view of religion.

Probably the best thing to come as a result of that podcast

Nassim Taleb does what Peterson doesn't

Taleb calls it sucker vs nonsucker and doesn't use pseudoscience such as Jung or evo-psychobabble to back that up

Taleb isn't hundred percent correct but much more balanced imo, he does his best to have facts backing up his claims

To put it bluntly Peterson uses fantasy to back up his own claims. But Peterson wins at his own game, his philosophy might be largely nonsense, it is a 'Darwinian truth' itself. He clearly has managed to get a cult following.

I think we will see, read and hear a lot more about Peterson. Critique most likely will not hurt him that much, in fact it gives him more attention and followers.

I like this one too.

Ehh, I'd say that his "religion is true" red herring isn't a red herring. It fits his very definition of true - it helps keep us alive by instilling a moral framework. This isn't necessarily wrong; I don't disagree at all.

I think a lot of people's issues are with his redefining of the word 'true', a redefinition that helps to define is view of the truthiness of god/religion/whatever. There are plenty of examples one could imagine in which moral evil allows for the continued existence of the human race.

>retard that's more interested in using linguistic acrobatics to win disputes than actually getting to the bottom of things
Could you be more of cliche, user?

Yeah but his argument isn't that a religion like Christianity is literally true because pragmatism.

His argument is that religions like Christianity have a deeper mythological narrative which is vastly older than the religion itself, and that this underlying mythological narrative speaks about correct action in the world(because it is evolved).

The reason he believes this is because he thinks that ancient people didn't have the sufficient abstract language we have as modern humans to articulate these "correct actions" so they had to couch it religious language.

>appealing to authority
It's like a toddler trying to argue with adults.

>flourishing
arbitrary, whereas there is a much more clear distinction between death and notdeath

I suppose so, but i think rather than peterson claiming it wasn't true those 1 billion years he would say it was true proximally, it was true on a more finite level, it was true enough to propel society for that long.

His argument is impossible to refute, but that doesnt make it bullshit. I mean he's a religious person, his style of truth is a more fiathful approach that simply cannot be disproved with science, they dont operate on the same plane.

But it sill seems like it makes more sense to me. I cannot wrap my head around how morals can be second to sceince or how science could shape our morals.

"We are moral infants and scientific giants, that's not good" is something Peterson said that I believe is true, and extremely dangerous.

Oh, I don't disagree with you or him in this respect. I really do believe what he says in relation to the spread and positive morale frameworks that are presented in Western religions. I also buy his view that these morale frameworks that have been couched in religious language have existed for so long because they have some innate value. These things are fine, and arguable and interesting.

But, w/r/t the Peterson debate, all he is doing is redefining 'truth'. Just because things are 'good' (progressive in a darwinian sense) does not in any way make them 'true'. Again, it is very easy for someone to come up with plenty of 'evil' scenarios in which the species could spread and 'flourish' (in terms of numbers). These examples (such as a global slave state, a cannibalistic alien species breeding us, etc) seem to show that Peterson's definition doesn't quite work without resorting to the sort of +1 nonsense I mentioned above.

...

I agree, without religion or at least an agreed (no literally) upon set of mythical structures it is hard to come up with a valid basis for morality. His connection of myth/religion to darwinism/survival is fine and dandy. I have no problem with that.

But, he is, simply, redefining truth, or at the very least, using it in a context that fits his argument and has nothing much to do with how anyone at large uses it, even within the philosophy community.

Things can be good, and morale, and there can be a foundation for such things (religious/mythical) but i fail to see how this is cause to change the standard definition of truth.

Yeah but don't you see that these flagrant thought experiments are so hypothetical that they are by definition non-pragmatic, which is why he objects to them in the first place?

Besides, he conceded several times that it would be "true enough" but not capital T-True™ because such hypotheticals don't include moral truth.

Ok, I'm with you...but his issue of 'cashing in' makes it so you can never bring up any real world example, because if it's something currently occurring he would say we'd need to wait and see if it fails...this extends on and on to infinity/post-humanism.

I understand this is hypothetical but It's not unrealistic: The human race destroys earth or makes it uninhabitable through our technological advancements and lack of oversight and whatever the hell else. We then go to another planet, and another. We colonize the galaxy, occasionally destroying planets, but then we reach the point where we can build our own out of the previously ruined ones...this continues forever. At what point does our actions become untrue or wrong? Is it only when we die as a species? Is it correct as long as we continue to breed?

Here's a highly abstract example but still: A group of travelers is walking along an unending path. They have no food so they eventually end up eating the elderly. Those that are eaten do not want to be eaten and it is incredibly painful. The travelers keep breeding and eating and breeding and eating. They have medicine that makes it so none of the ill effects of cannibalism occur. This goes on forever. At what point do their actions become wrong? Are they never wrong? Unless they die? Etc...

There is no difference between 'faith' and ' knowledge'

Well Peterson says what is true must include moral truth.

But what that moral truth entails is obviously a matter of debate to him. I sincerely doubt he thinks it would be justified to eat old people in the scenario you made just now.

I think this hilights how wishy-washy his thinking is on this subject. The way he frames his argument in the Harris debate makes it so he can constantly shift the goalposts/definition of truth depending on the outcome. I cannot see how his argument isn't circular.

He admits to gerrymandering the definition of truth... But this is what pragmatists do compared to the correspondent theorists of truth.

There's no such thing as *random adjective* truth, there just is. Science defines the limits of our perception, it's as truthful as human knowledge can get.

I don't quite understand what's happening here; I've just become aware of this.

Peterson seems to be stating that if we are to base ethics in scientific realism, then we must make a teological appeal to embodying the ideal man/woman.

What's with the telos?

There would be no telos in a scientific theory of anything.

I'm not exactly sympathetic with Harris either, just to clarify.

Also, wtf is Darwinian truth?

'The Darwinian framework is a moral framework'

'The highest truths are moral truths; in thinking that from a Darwinian perspective'

What the fuck is he talking about?

It sounds like he's sneaking teology into the descriptive (and most definitely not prescriptive) account of the origins of life.

What am I missing?

The problem with the podcast was that both of them are trash tier pseuds, one because he thinks rigidly and the other because he cant express himself at all in a debate.

Maybe im making his case stronger than it is here, but i dont think Peterson denies scientific fact exists, he denies that scientific fact should be a synonym of the word truth (which is the basis of materialist realism, as he calls it).

Such a conception of truth is, historically, a recent development. For our forefathers, truth was a word which also referred to moral and perhaps aesthetic truth, something that is expressed in the idea that God is truth. What Peterson is getting it is that a reduction of truth to scientific fact is inherently dangerous, in his pseudo-Darwinian formulation, because it both removes the moral questions that should be asked when pursuing scientific inquiry, and on a social level, because it empties religions and traditions of their evolved moral truth content by reducing the conversation to whether the specific supernatural doctrines make any sense (as Harris and Dawkins and others objections to religion illustrate) and ultimately leaves most individuals with a void which ideologies can easily fill with predictably terrible consequences.

I wonder how Harris would of responded to such a view, probably the same tbqhf.

Harris was being a dick by not letting the conversation move forward, but Peterson is just plain wrong, and I can point it out with his own philosophy.

If a person claims that they are nonbinary, and that that's TRUE to them, Peterson's pronoun argument is that the biology is contrary to their position and that this cannot be the case - that they are either male, or female, being nonbinary is not a "thing".

But say that receiving this condemnation of their nonbinary identity, the person is so distraught that he/she/ze/whatever kills themselves. By Peterson's own admission, then, his insistence that they are either male or female is FALSE, since it killed them, and what would have kept them alive - acceptance that they are nonbinary, would be TRUE.

Wow. You sound like a real pronoun apologist.

you are either genetically boy, girl or Jamie Lee Curtis

No, frankly I love Peterson and I am extremely compelled by his resistance to the pronoun thing and his views on religion. BUT I have to be fair, I realized just how paradoxical his own theory of truth can become if used against him. It makes no sense. He literally thinks every single thing that has a true/false dimension also has a moral dimension. Me saying "this table is made of wood" apparently has a moral dimension to him, and the empirical truth of the statement is second to the "moral direction" of it.

It doesn't help the Peterson was fucking horrible at essentially articulating a cogent epistemological pragmatist philosophy.

You mean Teleology, right? If so yes. You're not missing anything. A lot of Anons on here simultaneously hate SH and are enamored by JP so they herald pretty much anything JP says as incisive

terrible definition

I've listened to many of JP's lectures and always felt that he is unconcerned with logical consistency wherever it comes in conflict with traditional western schools of moralist thought.

His argument for "meaning" from human experience is that a person who is in pain acts differently than one who is not. He's quick to allege that anything worth a single byte of information is tantamount to "meaning". Therefore, it is meaningful to act on pure ideology. One such ideology may be "nothing has any meaning", entirely disassembling his own argument.

Yes, teleology.

Oh, well why the fuck couldn't Harris understand that?

And, why, when Peterson was just about to articulate his point (finally), Harris cut him off (about 50 mins in), after not letting the point go?

Harris was being a sausage and Peterson is injecting purpose into the purposeless, from what I can gather.

Although, everything Peterson made sense if you accept his 'truth serves life' axiom, which Sam seemed to instantly forget about.

Omg I'm near the end and Sam keeps asking how humans dying due to knowing certain truths invalidates said truths.

THE FUCKING AXIOM, SAM!

THE NIETZSCHEAN-ESQUE DEFINITION OF TRUTH, SAM!

a nigger who thinks religion is a inherently good thing has no rights to quote Nietzsche m8, Peterson seems to take protestant abnormalcy and imprint it on human nature.

Yeah mate, we gotta dare, we gotta go beyond and reach the level of the gods themselves. Either that or realize that most things we've done from the illuminism onwards were a mistake and escape to comfy hobbit anarcho-communist communes in the woods.

Well, his thoughts are far from Nietzschean, no doubt.

But his definition of truth is inspired by Nietzsche.

And yeah, he's sneaking meaning into the meaningless.

I seriously don't understand the humanities and their obsession with telos.

But seriously, Sam forgot the axiom and while Peterson didn't explain it very well/clarify, it was this absence of memory that led to a painfully awkward end.

These men are two intelectual non-entities famous for anything but their work in their field, you shouldn't really try to take anything constructive from this debate.

If you really hate trannies that much, Zizek has a book (partly) on identity politics, The Ticklish Subject deals with this, with benefit for being 20 year old book thought and written as a book, not some spastic reaction to SJWs protesting filmed with a fucking iphone.

I haven't taken anything from this, other than the knowledge that Sam can't 'assume X' and then proceed to engage in reasoning based on that assumption; a.k.a. deductive logic.

I don't hate trannies, where did you get that from?

>accept my axioms
>why
>just cause :3
Philosophy in a nutshell

Ok, Harris is saying that metaphysical naturalism, realism, physicalism, reductionism and whatever else science encompasses, can provide a basis for ethics.

Peterson says that science leads to a sort of hopeless nihilism and that therefore, in order for science provide moral guidance, its value system will have to be altered.

His suggestion is this 'Darwinian truth', whereby 'truth' is defined as that which serves life and is bound up with goodness, wisdom, beauty, etc.

Peterson only mentioned this once explicitly and failed to remind Harris and clarify this point.

Harris kept forgetting this different definition of truth and then when he did seem to remember it, he didn't address the it/launch relevant counter arguments.

It was very awkward towards the end.

As for Peterson's theory, I reject it and concede that science leads to a sort of hopeless nihilism, or perhaps an unjustified hedonism or even a sort of Epicurean-esque egoism (maximising long term happiness/wellbeing, and therefore not indulging in intensely pleasurable, but risky and damaging activities, such as drugs or unprotected promiscuous sex).

Anyway, that podcast kind of ended up being a waste of time.

P.S. Yes he didn't argue for his axiom, but it is based in pragmatism, which you're either familiar with or can google.

I don't endorse it, just to clarify.

>science leads to a sort of hopeless nihilism
But why? Does Peterson think we still live in deterministic newtonian world?
>moral guidance, its value system will have to be altered
That sounds hella preachy and fascistic, ironically coming from "muh freedom of though" advocate