Jordan Peterson says the basis for truth is utility

It's not like there's one video where Peterson lays out his beliefs that succinctly. It's my interpretation of watching a bunch of his shit (more than most people), and reading his book.

His views are close to mine and some of the authors I've read. For example Nassim Taleb, which I prefer.

Link to your favorite works?

>peterson is a philosophical pr*gmatist
holy shit just when i thought he couldnt get any worse

>pr*gmatist
what did he mean by this?

probably doesn't want to foul up the board with that kind of gutter talk

there is literally nothing wrong with pragmatism

>says the basis for truth is utility
Instead of being objective? Can someone explain to me how utilitarianism when applied to the 'truth' even works? Hypothetically, in a perfect world, if everything were accurate this would appropriate the most 'utils' per capita, however impracticable that would be. Regardless, human beings don't work like that. So some objectivity is given in regards to things lied about, like lying about buying something (theft) or not being truthful in regards to someone's existence and philosophy by murdering them. In a perfect utilitarian state with robots there would be no lying, no murders, and complete maximization of their existential teleology in addition to self-actualization.

But in the real world, lies happen all the time, so we grade them in intensity objectively. It is thought wrong to lie at all, and it is, but lets be honest here, the court system doesn't punish all liars in prison forever, only the ones that lie about whether they killed someone or molested someone.

he doesn't actually say the basis for truth is utility. op was just memeing

OP is memeing.
He only said that outside of stuff like classical categories and hard science and when concerned with practicality, utility is a sufficient qualifier for """true""". Like with the taxonomy of psychological disorders.

What you have to understand is that Peterson is a clinical psychologist first and foremost. He understands that in order to function in the world we have to live under certain assumptions that might not be objectively true. An objective person would look at his individual life, notice that all of his striving is going to lead to absolutely nothing worthwhile in cosmological terms, so he has to live under the delusion that his life matters if he doesn't want to succumb to nihilism.

Peterson's epistemological foundation is that he basically views everything through the prism of self-help and psychological well-being. If something isn't true but acting as if it is true leads to a well-adjusted (however you define that) well-socialized human being, then he defines that as being "true" according to his criteria.

He primarily functions as a therapist for his audience, not as a philosopher.

>He primarily functions as a therapist for his audience, not as a philosopher.
You might have made me have marginally more respect for the man.

(Tho I still disagree with what he chooses to make "true".)

>If something isn't true but acting as if it is true leads to a well-adjusted (however you define that) well-socialized human being, then he defines that as being "true" according to his criteria.
But he often talks about subjectively defined identity being an 'insane' proposition, he was constantly shitting on SJWs for their made-up pronouns

Because there is no evidence to support them (apart from actual real life trans, who are rare af) and the use of them is not pragmatic.
Also trying to enforce them is asinine.

No, what he says that you don't define your own identity. Your identity is a matrix of beliefs about yourself and about the world that form based on your subjective consciousness reacting to outside input and forming a synthesis we call identity. His issue with compelled pronouns is that it severs this process by turning identity into something that the subjective can enforce on the outside.

>An objective person would look at his individual life, notice that all of his striving is going to lead to absolutely nothing worthwhile in cosmological terms, so he has to live under the delusion that his life matters if he doesn't want to succumb to nihilism.
Peterson objects pretty strongly against this sort of "babby's first nihilism". Your life as a human being can matter even if you live on a single planet out of billions of others that make Earth seem cosmologically insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

If you feel that your life has meaning, then it is not a "delusion". It's the real thing.

I have no fucking idea why he's so against postmodernism if this is what he believes

Peterson describes subjective perception through a resolution analogy. A low resolution view of the individual leads to that sort-of nihilism, while perceiving the individual through the highest resolution possible would entail looking for the inherent psychological bases of human behavior, which can often supersede objective logic. If a man needs religion in order to be happy (not saying he does; just an example), then that psychological "truth" supersedes the truth of the historical claims his religion make.

That's one of my issues with him. He is obsessed with the growing pains of shifting culture and more often than not opts for pseudo-conservatism.
I get that it's the same rationale as with a patient who should take medication, but by applying it here... well, it's literally opium for the masses.
You are risking cultural stagnation on the grounds of comfort any by extension the very real chance at getting through it all and being the better for it, finding better solutions than "pretending as if god were real".

It may work for individuals, but not as a society.

Well it depends what you mean by postmodernism. Peterson is against the nihilistic and anarchistic strand, not Rortyian postmodernism or whatever.

To improve his argument against postmodernism, he must explain which aspects of postmodernism he finds illogical or detrimental to society as a whole. In my opinion, Jordan Peterson believes that psychology has become philosophy's final form and that anything deviating from that field is shit. Postmodernism is shit. Metamodernism is shit. The more radical the deviation from enlightenment approaches the more it is detestable

>You are risking cultural stagnation on the grounds of comfort any by extension the very real chance at getting through it all and being the better for it, finding better solutions than "pretending as if god were real".
Well this is the dialectical tension between conservatism and progressivism. Neither side is right per se, but we do tend to notice progressive wins more than we do conservative disaster-avoidance because the benefits are more immediately apparent.

I tend to err on the side of conservatism mostly because I think that there are many more ways for something to go wrong than for it to get better. A well-functioning society is always capable of collapsing. And I think that cultures that survived this long went through a sort of natural selection. They would have collapsed already if they weren't fit for survival. So you fuck with culture at your own peril.

because he's not, he's just using big intellectual sounding words (yes, I know postmodernism is a real thing and not a made up word, I didn't mean it that way) because otherwise he'd have to admit he's talking about princessdiamond from tumblr and MLPenis from deviantart
this way his targets are philosophers and other "serious" people and not teenagers/young people who draw horse penises, make ill-thought-out tattoos and yes - have wrong opinions

Meathead jp fan here hoping you anti jp folks can help me understand. I've gotten what I think is a great mix of ideas and entertainment from jp, mostly from his maps of meaning, personality and bible lectures. Postmodernism is rarely mentioned in those talks.

In some of his other talks he and others claim sjws use racism, sexism and violence against white males as a form of retribution against the "oppressing patriarchy" on behalf of the "oppressed". It's not about equal opportunities and equal rights, it's about punishing white males. Etc. He claims the people encouraging/driving these impressionable sjw kids are evil post modernist and or marxist professors. The same people who have cancered up humanities, social sciences, literature, education courses in unis. People who are trying to indocrinate kids from a young age into sjwism.

So this is the part I don't understand. The objection to him I've seen over and over is that he doesn't understand postmodernism or is trying to make a postmodernism boogeyman. For those who think this, what is your motivation in defending postmodernism? Are you sjws? Are you defending sjws? If postmodernism isn't at the root of this evil sjw movement, what is? Going by the vids of protesters, marxism seems to be a factor. Going by some of the anti jp posts here it looks like postmodernism is little more than a trigger word for cranky and humorless sjws, and so the meathead jp fans shitpost with it in that way, because it gets (You)'s. I'm posting this to learn where I'm wrong, so let me have it.