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>>> Personally, I think secular philosophers were tricked into giving up the one tool or razor that would have kept them from drowning in the hall of mirrors flooded with bullshit that their field has become, and that is the question, "is this philosophy, ideology, or critical theory designed to deceive and subordinate us to others, and if so, who, how, and to what end?" ... If you just take a cryptanalyst or a hackers mindset to it and ask, "am I being deceieved?" the whole secular dialectic materialist edifice crumbles. I would argue that this question is also necessarily theistic, as it presupposes truth, and a belief in truth is proof of a belief in something divine by which truth can be measured or compared. That is how fragile this stuff is.

This probably one of the most insightful things I have read on HN in a good while in terms of dealing with bs, which seems to be a staple of the era we live in. Sometimes all it takes is to question the motive of the message to peel the onion.

side note first, dialectic materialism is as modernist and 'truthy' as it gets. It stands in stark contrast to the the kind of thinking you appear to disagree with.

To the main point, you're honestly just being sentimental. You're calling secular philosophers nihilistic, predatory, accuse them of trickery but you're not actually making a point to be honest. They may be all those things, that doesn't mean their arguments are bad.

The article talks about a very foundational question. Can metaphysics make progress? Is it possible to come to consensus when in fact everyone, as you put it, has to accept someone else's ontological premises in arbitrary fashion?

The answer to that question is probably not, and Wittengestein, Rorty, and the mentioned pragmatists have deflated this kind of discourse successfully. Pay close attention to your own rhetoric

"it's just designed to homogenize and liquify culture to produce nihilistic ideologues who can't be trusted as fellow citizens to share a recourse to truth."

This is not an argument, that's someone saying "don't listen to the devil kids". It's appealing to a notion of truth as a sort of communal protection racket because you don't like the consequences of Rorty et al being right. In fact even worse, you're doing the sort of power play you're accusing the philosophers in question of. "They are trying to homogenize our culture, don't listen to them!, if we don't believe in capital T Truth, everything will fall apart!"

Sharp! I'm rejecting the premise that metaphysics should make progress, or that progress is an artifact of anything other than wishful secularism and deception at all. When we do discover new tools in it, the version numbers for metaphysics shouldn't increment, they should go backwards to approach zero. Is that progress? Imo, metaphorically directional, but otherwise no.

The reason someone says, "don't listen to the devil kids" is it's the best tool they can equip a young mind with that it can understand. I'd argue it's distinct from the same kind of noble lies I'm criticising, in that it's a metonym.

Responses like this make risking being very publicly wrong worth it, thank you.

"the logic of an idea, where when you project it on something, the reflection doesn't illuminate the object so much as reinforce the underlying idea itself as a lens."

The shape of the tool is as important as the shape of the material, and that is technology.

Maybe there is real engineering/science/philosophy to be made there, but I guess it might become the ITER/LHC of philosophy if attempted.

>To another commenter here, it does indeed sound like Poppers paraphrase, which is a thought terminating cliche that protects lazy minds from dissonance. When inclusion of authors and texts from unexpected* places was transgressive it added perspective, but now, it's just designed to homogenize and liquify culture to produce nihilistic ideologues who can't be trusted as fellow citizens to share a recourse to truth.

I have nothing to add, just want to say that you hit the nail on the head and this sentence in particular is enlightening.

I don’t believe in anything divine, because my equations do not require it. Also, yours don’t either. You are like a child drawing happy suns in blue skies because that’s what you like. It’s not required.

I have no need of “Truth.” I just notice and make use of persistent, reliable patterns to make safe conjectures that will have consequences for people who disregard them. I call that the truth. That’s good enough.

> It's just more dialectic materialism, where to even start a conversation with someone using it, you have to accept ontological premises that are necessarily absurd.

Imagine, if you will, two legislators arguing some bill in some parliament. The first is proposing some amendment to the bill which hinges on the existence of God. The second argues against it believing there is no God.

The question is, can this be resolved? Let us assume they are both perfectly rational and exhibit impeccable integrity. Could they forward arguments to settle their dispute? Let's assume they are both scientific materialists. Can they investigate the material world to find evidence to support their positions and resolve their dispute?

I don't know. If given infinite time, maybe? I honestly don't know. But as of now, it would seem that even given a complete willingness from either party to change their mind based on either argument or evidence we would still find ourselves at an impasse.

So a third person shows up and says: It would seem that we are at an impasse, stuck in a kind of infinite loop. The cause of that infinite loop seems to be our inability to determine whether or not God exists. I suggest we set aside the question of whether or not God exists since what we really want to do here is pass legislation that makes every life better. After we finish up doing what we need to do, we can go down to the pub and have a really good discussion on the topic of the existence of God. But for now, in the interest of making progress on practical matters, I suggest we put the question aside and find other points to discuss.

Miraculously the legislators agree. The first then puts forward the argument that the bill should pass if knowledge is primarily based in the material world. The other legislator scoffs and insists the bill should not pass because knowledge is primarily based within the conscious mind.

So the third person says, we're at an impasse again. Somehow you have alighted on another premise that does not seem solvable through rational or empirical investigation. Our discussion will remain stuck until we disallow any premise that can't be either rationally or empirically determined. Both men lament: "this man is forcing us to accept an ontological premise that is absurd".

I'm sorry that my attempt to explain pragmatism with a tortuous analogy is basically fodder for /r/badphilosophy

It seems like the proper solution would be to write the legislation such that it would be reasonably acceptable no matter whether knowledge is primarily based in the material world or the conscious mind.

My examples were chosen, of course, to be ridiculous. "Compromise" is a major point of the work done by the political philosophers who are identified with Pragmatism. The fact that the word compromise is so liberally used in modern political discourse is likely due to this influence.

However, as is the case in some governments, the very idea that one would compromise with their enemies is an anathema. This is especially true if one side believes they are fighting against evil. It is also the case that some people are just trolls; bad actors delighting in bad faith.

It also starts getting into game theory. For example, one could forward a totally absurd position that tries to force a "legislation such that it would be reasonably acceptable no matter ..." which is actually what I wanted in the first place. That is, demand that the opposition compromise with an absurd position in order to get what I really wanted all along. It could be argued that the polarization we see in modern politics is partly attributed to this.

Pragmatism has a lot of problems which the philosophers have wrestled with. I suppose some of that complexity just goes away if you refuse to deal with indeterminate positions as a rule.