"There are many reasons to love Lena Dunham’s HBO television show Girls, and some of them have nothing to do with sex, but I'm going to begin with the sex scene in the second episode that most critics have mentioned and described with some amount of repugnance or lament."

defrndr · 2012-05-21T23:21:22.949541+00:00

It was published by someone who is on the Forbes Staff

Yeah, shame on him for having interests.

defrndr · 2012-05-21T23:18:56.267391+00:00

Jon Stewart has occasionally stated that he is primarily an entertainer.

Stewart's point in those cases is usually that it shouldn't be up to people like him to call serious journalistic outlets on bog-standard muck-racking, and/or that retorts The Daily Show lets editorial comment override factual investigation are ridiculous because it's serious journalists comparing themselves to a fake news show.

He does clearly aspire to a form of journalistic ethics...

More often, I would say that he aspires to social criticism, which is the natural terrain for a comedian. His two primary subjects as a comedian are 1) the patently absurd lengths to which politicians will go in one-upping one another's partisanship, and 2) the rank awfulness of 24-hour cable news.

phileconomicus · 1 day

Ah, I see. I originally thought that you had meant something slightly different by "chemical addiction and psychological habituation." Now I understand that you're talking about physical dependence v. addictive behavior. That is to say, the difference between the physiological response to deprivation, rather than habituated behavior. Suffice it to say, Plato was talking about behavior, not physical dependence, and it's doubtful that the words he used could even be accurately translated into our dual-use term, "addiction."

anutensil · 1 day

Among other things, we asked them to identify the first book of the New Testament from a choice of Matthew, Genesis, Acts of the Apostles, Psalms, "Don't know" and "Prefer not to say". Only 35% chose Matthew and 39% chose "Don't know" (and 1%, mysteriously, chose "Prefer not to say").

To be fair, the question is ambiguous. It doesn't draw a distinction between canonical order and chronological order.

Prolonged wars have been fought over how we should interpret the words allegedly uttered at the Last Supper. Three bishops were burned alive just outside my bedroom window in my old Oxford college for giving the unapproved answer. Centuries-long schisms were based on nothing more serious than the question of whether Jesus is both God and his son, or just his (very important) son.

That's a grotesque oversimplification. Theological matters were rarely (if ever) the sole or even primary motivation behind such conflicts, and were often intertwined with disagreements of a more expressly political nature. Dawkins admitted as much in The God Delusion, but seems to have since aligned himself more closely with the position espoused by Harris and Hitchens.

phileconomicus · 1 day

A body wracked by severe withdrawal symptoms demands relief.

A person wracked by those symptoms will likely believe that another dose of their addiction is the best thing for them. (They may even be right.) I'm not sure that the distinction between chemical addiction and psychological habituation really undermines Plato's thesis. It seems to me that the best way to do that, if you have any interest in doing so, would be to demonstrate that believe isn't involved at all.

TheresJustNoWay · 1 day

I don't, though. At least, not in the same way. The greenness is a sensory perception, apparently deriving from external phenomena. I may learn about the date rape from external perceptions, but the sense of wrongness that I attribute to that act appears to originate in my own faculties, and not from outside my own mind.

TheresJustNoWay · 1 day

When I look at a tree in the spring, I know without any doubt that it's leaves are green. How? Because I see that they are.

Do you, though? Even without the passingofdays' Cartesian demon, we have plenty of reason, rooted in modern science, for doubting that the quality of greenness is an attribute of the leaves, rather than an attribute of our experience. I would argue that you do know that green is involved, but that greenness adheres not to the leaves themselves but to your experience of the leaves.

And that's where the question of intuition v. impressions gets complicated. It's probably that our intuitions mediate our impressions for us, so that we presume that our experiences map reliably to the sources of those impressions.

TheresJustNoWay · 1 day

I guess I don't understand what you mean by impressions that are internal or external.

That's mostly just me being a bit slack with language. Technically, our conviction that our experiences somehow map to a world that stands apart from our knowing it would derive from an intuition, not an impression. In short:

impressions:external::intuitions:internal

If so, then I'd argue that moral perception is also caused by external impressions...

Then I'm not really sure in what sense you'd say that we're intuiting moral values. If they're received from external impressions, how does that qualify as intuition.

Going back to your original question:

That is to say, when you see something with your eyes and you intuit that it is green or far away, how is that different from seeing something with your eyes and intuiting that it is wrong? Is it merely a reliability issue?

I'd say they differ in that our sense of the greenness of the thing is directly related to an impression that we've gotten, presumably from the thing itself, while our sense of the wrongness of a thing is more properly an intuition. Our experience of the action is an impression, but the value we place on it derives from some personal source – to wit, the mind.

TheresJustNoWay · 1 day

I wasn't answering because I wasn't logged on. Had a Very Important Party to attend.

Would you clarify that phrase for me please?

I mean only that, assuming that part of the problem of knowledge is that much of what we want to know is divorced from our direct faculty for knowing – in commoner terms, that there is a world apart from our knowing it – then the data that we get from that world must somehow come to us from outside of that faculty, e.g. our minds. Of course, there are philosophies that deny that altogether, like Berkeleyan Idealism, but I take it for granted that thepassingofdays has something else (ahem) in mind.

To simplify our mode of expression here a bit, let's establish a little short hand. By the term external world I mean the aggregate of things that somehow exist apart from our knowing them – that is, the world-as-it-is. Whether or not there's any such thing as the external world is a separate question, so I don't mean to step on anyone's comfortable solipsism. In this context, all I mean by mind is our faculty for knowing anything. By no means do I mean to imply that mind is a distinct substance, a la Cartesian/Platonic dualism, although I'll leave that an open possibility, since it doesn't yet bear on the question. And in this particular case, I'll mostly be talking about selves as the (self-identified) identities associated with each particular mind – which is not necessarily to say that selves couldn't imply more than that.

So, assuming that we do somehow get information from the world apart from our own minds, it seems proper to draw a distinction between that information and the information that we do get from our own minds. For example, our notion that what we experience somehow lines up with the external world is ultimately information (be it true or false) that we get from our own minds. That's what I would call an "intuition," following the derivation that I've outlined elsewhere. To recap: in- denoting interiority, and tuition denoting instruction or learning. Thus, intuition is the means by which we receive information from some source within ourselves. We might even go so far as to say that our sense of constitution a self is an intuition. By contrast, an impression would be the way in which we receive information from the external world, with our senses being the receptors.

That's a potentially important distinction to make because, with regard to the central question of epistemology, we may have good cause to assign different degrees of warrantability to different epistemic claims based on whether those claims originated in the mind or the external world. That plays into a variety of different epistemic positions. For example, the premise that selfhood is an illusion (c.f. e.g. Daniel Dennett, Bruce Hood, some forms of Buddhism) is typically rooted in an epistemology that asserts more warrantability for knowledge gained from external sources than from intuition. Moral intuitionism – the premise that moral truth can be known on the basis of intuition alone, and which seems to be the motive force behind most epistemic intuitionism – asserts more warrantability for intuition than those external sources.

It doesn't really figure much into my thinking, but I would say that qualia could apply to both intuitions and impressions, in as much as qualia is just a term indicating the incommensurability of experience. Both intuitions and impressions are forms of experience, so I don't see any reason why we shouldn't describe the constituent elements of both as qualia.

TheresJustNoWay · 2 days

You mean, apart from that interior/exterior distinction? Because that seems potentially significant to me.

TheresJustNoWay · 2 days

You're the second person I've seen talking about perception as though it were a form of intuition. It's odd to me, because the history of that term would seem to indicate that it was used primarily to distinguish between knowledge that comes from external sources, and knowledge that comes from interior source. Thus, in+tuition, where tuition means teaching or instruction.

It's still reasonable to inquire about the role of intuition in our impression that what we perceive is an accurate reflection of the world as it is, but perceptions on their own are a distinct category, insofar as we regard them as deriving from impressions external to our own minds.

underground_man-baby · 2 days

It doesn't really matter. Based on our discussions over the last several days, I've decided that you're conflating intuitionism and empiricism – probably in order to lend more credence to moral intuitionism than it deserves. Since you are either unwilling or unable to explain how intuition could justify belief (and thus constitute knowledge), we're at an impasse.

YaMeanCoitus · 2 days

It was Haack.

all_my_rage · 3 days

Any life that goes to one extreme or the other. That's the basic principle of Nicomachean Ethics. For example, bravery is the mean between cowardice and fool-heartiness. The extremes are to be avoided; the mean, to be attained.

YaMeanCoitus · 3 days

If you're talking about the Louis Menand anthology, it's a bit controversial – mostly, I gather, because it leans heavily toward Rortian pragmatism, to the veritable exclusion of more traditional (and some would say viable) forms of the doctrine. One prominent modern Pragmatist reviewed it saying, "Rortianism is vulgar pragmatism, and this is vulgar Rortianism."

soGnar32 · 3 days

That's sort of weird question. The Categorical Imperative is basically a test for coherence in possible moral maxims. It says, if a maxim is genuinely moral, then it will be categorically moral – that is, moral in all situations and circumstances. You can't really act in accordance with the Imperative itself, just in accordance with maxims that pass the test for categorical coherence. And if you act against such a maxim, you are, by Kant's reasoning, behaving immorally.

underground_man-baby · 3 days

That isn't what I asked.

blackstar9000 · 4 days

Can we agree that most Christians recite and agree with the Apostles Creed?

I simply don't know if most Christians recite and agree with it. I'm content to not draw any conclusions based on a premise I don't know to be true.

underground_man-baby · 4 days

Is that the extend of the meaning you're working with? If I a) see a cloud, and b) feel that I am being watched, are those both intuitions? Is there no difference between them? In other words, are all appearances intuitions?

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