David Hume vs. Sam Harris

Ichneumonwasp said:
If that is his argument, then I can only point out that he has mangled it in my estimation.

In fact, I think he has sidled his way into an equivocation fallacy.

There are forms of reasoning that do not depend on emotion; we call them mathematics/calculation. It's what our current iterations of computers do.

For human reasoning to function, however, emotion must play a role, but it plays a slightly different role in different types of reasoning.

So, for instance, the reason why we engage in discussions about 9/11 is determined by desires and motivations, but the reasoning process itself is best left to arguing data not determined by emotional factors. His argument about how truthers go about their business supports Haidt's position that folks have a marked tendency to rely on ascertainment bias in their arguments; and emotional input is the primary reason behind it. When it comes to what actually happened on 9/11, however, I will repeat, there is a set of data that is explained better by one and not the other theory. ETA: That a group of people flew planes into several structures and there is no actual evidence of explosives in the rubble, etc. are simple facts. They are not determined by our emotional involvement in discussing the process. Granted, the importance we assign those facts is determined by our emotional involvement, but that is part of the equivocation as I see it.

When it comes to moral reasoning, however, we have no recourse but to rely ultimately on emotion/motivation/desire/feeling. Morality does not exist without values and values do not exist without desire/feeling. In that sense, feeling is the very basis of all moral reasoning in a way that it is not for other types of reasoning -- we only think about 9/11 because of our feelings about it, but we should not think about it using our feelings about it as the primary mode of intellectual input. Feelings are, by their very nature, the primary input for moral thinking, though. ETA: Or, in other words, emotion/desire/motivation/feeling constitute the 'facts' in moral reasoning (as opposed to reasoning about occurrences in the world that many people can see where the facts do not depend on emotion).

So, folks might make the mistake of interjecting too much emotion into their appraisal of 9/11 facts, but it does not follow that subjectivity being the improper approach in that instance translates into a mistake in moral decision making. Morality simply is another fish.
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I think you misunderstand the point.

According to Angrysoba's Harris' Haidt:

People disagree on morality because they get really emotional about it and the fact they get all emotional about it demonstrates there is no fact of the matter.

It is Harris (and me!) saying that this is unsound reasoning and it can be shown (shown as opposed to being an analogy!) that this takes place with almost any area of controversy. I only point this out because the case of Haidt's research was brought up by another poster to show that this is how people arrive at moral beliefs.

Oh wait, no it is was you Ichneumonwasp!
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
Look into Jonathan Haidt's work for examples of the different ways that folks approach moral problem solving.
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I realize that I may have misunderstood Harris' interpretation of the paper which is why I talked about transmission errors but I still don't think that those who are saying, "well there is an objective truth to 9/11" are making a good point. Rather they are question-begging given that Harris thinks that moral questions also have an objective truth.
 
angrysoba said:
I think you misunderstand the point.

According to Angrysoba's Harris' Haidt:

People disagree on morality because they get really emotional about it and the fact they get all emotional about it demonstrates there is no fact of the matter.

It is Harris (and me!) saying that this is unsound reasoning and it can be shown (shown as opposed to being an analogy!) that this takes place with almost any area of controversy. I only point this out because the case of Haidt's research was brought up by another poster to show that this is how people arrive at moral beliefs.

Oh wait, no it is was you Ichneumonwasp!
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Whether or not that is the case with Haidt that is not the point of this thread or the discussion at hand.

I don't think that was actually Haidt's point, anyway; and perhaps that is the source of confusion. Much of his work concerns the actual way that people moralize, correct. It does not follow, however, that this is a proper way of arriving at moral decisions.

I brought up Haidt to point out that there are many ways that people actually do arrive at their moral decisions, that they use different styles of thinking, so that we can't just point to one way as The Right Way To Do It without excluding several possible different cognitive styles.

The original analogy, by the way, was Harris' -- that both modes of thinking are identical. For the reasons I supplied above in that earlier post, I think it clear that I disagree with him.

That people can get emotional about discussions is not even an interesting observation, so I don't think that was really Harris' point either.
 
angrysoba said:
I realize that I may have misunderstood Harris' interpretation of the paper which is why I talked about transmission errors but I still don't think that those who are saying, "well there is an objective truth to 9/11" are making a good point. Rather they are question-begging given that Harris thinks that moral questions also have an objective truth.
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I have brought up before in several different threads that we mean several different things by the word 'objective'. I think the best definition is something more along the lines of 'inter-subjective' where several subjective interpretations/perceptions are shared amongst folks. That does not appear to be the case when we speak of emotion/desire/etc. since there are people who simply do not seem to have the same sorts of emotional responses to the same situation.
 
Ichneumonwasp said:
I have brought up before in several different threads that we mean several different things by the word 'objective'. I think the best definition is something more along the lines of 'inter-subjective' where several subjective interpretations/perceptions are shared amongst folks. That does not appear to be the case when we speak of emotion/desire/etc. since there are people who simply do not seem to have the same sorts of emotional responses to the same situation.
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Yes, I agree that the word "objective" means different things depending upon the situation. Harris also makes this point in his book.
 
Humes fork said:
Most of the time, "scientism" is just a strawman.
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I know that people who subscribe to scientism always call it science. But the test for science is whether it's in the science literature produced by scientists. If not, it's something else.
 
angrysoba said:
He also says, in his book, that he knew people would accuse him of that.
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Well, one doesn't need to be a prophet to predict that. His claim ("this can be done scientifically") was one of the two necessary conditions for it to be properly classified as scientism. The other necessary condition is to blatantly fail to deliver compelling evidence for the claim.

Scientism is to fail to be scientifically rigorous while still claiming it's science.
 
Dani said:
Well, one doesn't need to be a prophet to predict that. His claim ("this can be done scientifically") was one of the two necessary conditions for it to be properly classified as scientism. The other necessary condition is to blatantly fail to deliver compelling evidence for the claim.

Scientism is to fail to be scientifically rigorous while still claiming it's science.
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Which is to say - to provide quantifiable, objectively testable predictions. Nothing that I've seen is quantifiable, he provides no testable predictions, and the whole thing is entirely subjective.

Apart from that it's fine.
 
westprog said:
I know that people who subscribe to scientism always call it science. But the test for science is whether it's in the science literature produced by scientists. If not, it's something else.
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I think, by that definition, nothing would ever get published.
 
sphenisc said:
I think, by that definition, nothing would ever get published.
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Eh? I'm helping produce a thesis at the moment. (Purely from an Office 2010 pov, not content). A vast amount of peer-reviewed science gets published every year. It's written by scientists. They are obliged to produce detailed reasoning to show how they came to their conclusions. At least in the hard sciences, pretty much the same procedures are followed world wide, and can be relied on to the extent that very little is produced which is actually wrong - though I suppose a lot of it isn't of any very great value. When something like Cold Fusion crops up, the system is designed to investigate extraordinary claims.

There's also a vast "scientific" literature out there. Some of it is popularisation, produced by scientists for people who wouldn't be able to follow the original papers. Some of it is speculation - scientists thinking aloud about future possibilities. Some of it is rubbish. How can one tell if it's rubbish or not? Well, the safest bet is to assume that if it's not part of the peer-reviewed world, then it's not to be relied on.

There's nothing fascist or unreasonable about this. Indeed, the ability of scientists world-wide to ignore restrictions of race, nationality and belief systems is quite heartening. A physics library in India will look much like one in Australia, and they will all be working with the same science.
 
Wowbagger said:
What, exactly, is wrong with scientism?
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As long as scientism accepts that it is a belief system, nothing. I don't even mind when the proponents of scientism claim that it is far more probable and reasonable than other belief systems. What is objectionable is when scientism claims to be science.
 
Examples of Sam Harris moving the goalposts that I addressed in previous threads:



At 22:30, Harris says:

The notion that facts and values are distinct breaks down again when you look at how we describe the most basic understanding of the physical universe.

You take water. We now know something about its structure: water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. We've known this for about 150 years. What do you do when someone comes into the room and doubts this proposition. What do you do with a skeptic about water chemistry? How do you change their mind? Well, you have to appeal to certain values. You have to... first of all, the person has to want to understand the world, that is a core scientific value. There's some virtue in figuring out what is actually going on. So what would you say to someone who says "listen, actually my chemistry doesn't have much to do with understanding the world, I just want make everything fit the book of Genesis. That's my version." That person can use the word chemistry all here she wants, but it's not chemistry in the way that any real chemist would acknowledge, and no chemist would be burdened with the task of saying "well, if I just can't convince that guy, maybe there's no truth to chemistry, maybe I'm wasting my life".

Anyone in this room doesn't think this is a tight analogy? This is the kind of criticism I get equating morality and human values to questions of the well-being of conscious creatures. We have to value evidence. What do you say to someone who doesn't value evidence? What evidence could you provide that would suggest they should value evidence [crowd laughs, circularity is funny]. What logic could you use to show the necessity of valuing logical consistency.

Intellectual honesty, Parsimony, mathematical elegance... these are all values.

So the notion that many of you I'm sure have heard, loosely derived from David Hume, that you can never get an ought from an is, that you can never get to a statement about what you ought to do based merely on a description of the way the world is... we only get to "is", to scientific statements, through "oughts", through values.
The only way you say what water is is: first you ought to respect evidence, you ought to want to understand the world, you ought to be logically consistent...
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In the highlighted part, Harris is either:

- Trying to convince the audience by saying that since we get ises from oughts (let's agree with the premise for now, for the sake of the argument) we can therefore get oughts from ises.

This is an obvious non sequitur.

Or:

- Saying that given that the scientific method is built on values (again, let's agree with that for the sake of the argument; I'll comment on it later) why can't we add another value to it? How about this one I have here about the well-being of conscious creatures?

This accomplishes three things: it begs the question (why do we need to change what we define as the scientific method?), it moves the goalposts (now science doesn't answer moral questions, they are answered axiomatically within the foundational principles of science - ta daah! -) and makes an irrelevant point (so in the end Harris agrees that we needed an axiomatic value in order to do science from that, huh?)


And from his introduction in The Moral Landscape:

The very idea of “objective” knowledge (i.e., knowledge acquired through honest observation and reasoning) has values built into it, as every effort we make to discuss facts depends upon principles that we must first value (e.g., logical consistency, reliance on evidence, parsimony, etc.)
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Yeah, he is actually making this argument.


Now, the premise that I was accepting for the sake of the argument:

The assumption that in order to do science we need values is not accurate. At least, they are not values in the same sense as moral values. Logic, for example, is not a value. It's something necessary to do science. Ignoring logic implies ignoring science. No value there in the sense of "torture is morally wrong", because it doesn't imply that everyone should respect logic consistency. One can perfectly ignore logic: it just isn't scientific.
 
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