Re: "I think of post-modernist political activism as resting on a foundational belief that power relations govern everything in the world, including what you believe."
Compare governance of power in constitutional democracy. Enumerated rights, separation of powers (branches), myriad checks and balances among powers, decentralization of jurisdictions of power, periodic elections, plebiscites, constitutional amendment procedures, a free press, and markets are supposed to limit concentration of power.
It sometimes occurs that a political party or partisan ideology cuts across these institutional checks, and wields tyranny of the majority despite constitutional design.
Civil-service bureaucracies become entrenched and exercise persistent soft power.
HR becomes entrenched in private orgs and reports up to political power.
Now, back to Arnold's sketch of post-modern political activism: Do these various power relations also govern what we believe? It seems unlikely. Any teacher will confirm that it's hard to change a student's mind about a normative issue the student cares about. Any corporation will confirm that it's hard to brainwash consumers. People don't change their minds about abortion when the majority opinion in the Supreme Court changes. Politicians are always counting votes. Media cater to viewer dogmas.
Belief-formation in novel situations is a puzzle. Examples are rapid convergence in beliefs about pandemic policy in March 2020, and about foreign policy towards Ukraine in February 2022.
I hope that Arnold will write a post about J.S. Mill's notion of the marketplace of ideas.
There's something missing when you soften from 'every' to 'some.' Dogma is what models and math refer to as a 'strong assumption' vs a 'weak assumption.' Weak assumptions are the 'often' and 'sometimes' assumptions. Strong assumptions are the 'always' or maybe 'in all the cases that matter.'
‘If post-modernist political activism... Beliefs come from power relations, not from anything objective.’ And by extension, in the power stakes, beliefs now come from ‘feelings’ of victims of that supposed power. So we hear people talk about ‘my’ truth, as if there is no absolute truth, just ‘their’ truth as victims - how what is external to them makes them ‘feel’, which trumps reality - and makes the World a liar. Perhaps not foundational belief but emotional belief: fantasy, fragility, devoid of logic, reason or empiricism? And of course impossible to debate. 2 + 2 can equal whatever ‘my’ truth says and anyway mathematics is ‘racist’ because that’s ‘my’ truth as its creators’ (White men) victim, an emotional belief according to my (fragile) feelings.
Is Ayers dogma, as you call it, really a dogma? It is essentially the same as Russells "it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true" or the so called Hitchens razor: that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The logical way to verify Ayers statement would be to say: we should believe a proposition when there is good grounds for supposing it is true. The reasons we have to believe it are as strong as the evidence in support of it. No supporting evidence, no reason to believe it. Is that a dogma? More like a tautology: if there is no reason to believe something, then there is no reason to believe it.
Here is how I understand Arnold's avowedly dogmatic advice for choosing dogma.
1. Reject non-falsifiable theories -- Live by Karl Popper's dogma. (Should one therefore avoid all other dogmas?)
2. Reject the principle of authority -- Ipse dixit. (But can democracy thrive without wise deference, given that voters cannot possibly become competent in myriad complex policy areas?)
3. Reject ad hominem arguments.
4. Embrace the principle of charity in interpretation. (But don't wise people balance the principle of charity and 'the hermeneutics of suspicion' in interpretation, given that deception and self-deception are part of life?)
I was just reading Locke’s “Essays on the Law of Nature,” after reading this post. Locke’s definition of reason is whatever is “correctly derived from” true foundational beliefs (“certain definite principles of action” is how he puts it).
That makes the point that to the extent that our foundational beliefs are wrong, the rest of our reason falls apart.
Dogma is useful. "Murder is bad" is dogma. Jonah Goldberg has done some commentary on this.
University telos is dogma. Traditionally it was truth. "Lux et veritas" is on more than one university crest. Haidt says choose truth over social justice for university telos.
"One of my foundational beliefs is that our attempts to arrive at complete empirical truth always fall short. " God exists. Or,
God does NOT exist.
Only one of these dogma beliefs is true. When people believe it, only one of them leads to optimal human happiness. It might be that optimal living and truth not quite the same.
Charles Murray is tweeting more about religion, and seeming to come to the opinion I have: without religious belief in absolutes, the reason oriented relativists inevitably degenerate into a Will To Power. I believe in God, but argue we can't know, empirically. (I doubt many specifics of Christianity - but accept we humans can never fully understand God.)
We can evaluate the lives of humans living with different views. It's pretty clear that those who are God-fearing religious folk, avoid more of the worst behaviors more often.
Sadly, the cultural norms that are an optimal trade-off of freedom & responsibility & well-being for low IQ folk, often called morals, seem to not be optimal for more capable high IQ folk. How important is sexual monogamy for marriage and raising kids? It's clear in the data that monogamous couples raise fewer problematic kids - but the cultural norm is moving away from that, to the detriment especially of kids with lower SES parents.
I'm more comfy talking more about trade-offs, than arguing about the truth/falseness of particular foundational beliefs. The world's discussions, not so much here, would be better with more explicit trade-offs noted.
There is a movement afoot lately to show that instead of foundational beliefs, one should think about foundational rules for what to believe, and that these can be justified by showing that they're conducive to accuracy. Richard Pettigrew is a central figure in this approach. Personally I don't think you can get enough out of it to be satisfying, but it is interesting.
My own view is that you have to supplement these rules with some foundational, obvious epistemic assumptions, like Occam's Razor. So these would be the only "dogma" that one ought to believe. Someone like eg Jennifer Lackey might say that principles about when to accept what other people say would belong in the dogma, but these don't seem like rock-bottom principles to me.
There is also the question of whether there ought to be foundations at all, or whether you simply start with whatever belief system you have and try to make it more coherent and empirically successful by modifying it. Quine was a "coherentist" in this sense.
To paraphrase Mencken, we get the dogmas we deserve good and hard.
Someone is brushing up on their Aristotle...
Re: "I think of post-modernist political activism as resting on a foundational belief that power relations govern everything in the world, including what you believe."
Compare governance of power in constitutional democracy. Enumerated rights, separation of powers (branches), myriad checks and balances among powers, decentralization of jurisdictions of power, periodic elections, plebiscites, constitutional amendment procedures, a free press, and markets are supposed to limit concentration of power.
It sometimes occurs that a political party or partisan ideology cuts across these institutional checks, and wields tyranny of the majority despite constitutional design.
Civil-service bureaucracies become entrenched and exercise persistent soft power.
HR becomes entrenched in private orgs and reports up to political power.
Now, back to Arnold's sketch of post-modern political activism: Do these various power relations also govern what we believe? It seems unlikely. Any teacher will confirm that it's hard to change a student's mind about a normative issue the student cares about. Any corporation will confirm that it's hard to brainwash consumers. People don't change their minds about abortion when the majority opinion in the Supreme Court changes. Politicians are always counting votes. Media cater to viewer dogmas.
Belief-formation in novel situations is a puzzle. Examples are rapid convergence in beliefs about pandemic policy in March 2020, and about foreign policy towards Ukraine in February 2022.
I hope that Arnold will write a post about J.S. Mill's notion of the marketplace of ideas.
There's something missing when you soften from 'every' to 'some.' Dogma is what models and math refer to as a 'strong assumption' vs a 'weak assumption.' Weak assumptions are the 'often' and 'sometimes' assumptions. Strong assumptions are the 'always' or maybe 'in all the cases that matter.'
‘If post-modernist political activism... Beliefs come from power relations, not from anything objective.’ And by extension, in the power stakes, beliefs now come from ‘feelings’ of victims of that supposed power. So we hear people talk about ‘my’ truth, as if there is no absolute truth, just ‘their’ truth as victims - how what is external to them makes them ‘feel’, which trumps reality - and makes the World a liar. Perhaps not foundational belief but emotional belief: fantasy, fragility, devoid of logic, reason or empiricism? And of course impossible to debate. 2 + 2 can equal whatever ‘my’ truth says and anyway mathematics is ‘racist’ because that’s ‘my’ truth as its creators’ (White men) victim, an emotional belief according to my (fragile) feelings.
Is Ayers dogma, as you call it, really a dogma? It is essentially the same as Russells "it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true" or the so called Hitchens razor: that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The logical way to verify Ayers statement would be to say: we should believe a proposition when there is good grounds for supposing it is true. The reasons we have to believe it are as strong as the evidence in support of it. No supporting evidence, no reason to believe it. Is that a dogma? More like a tautology: if there is no reason to believe something, then there is no reason to believe it.
Here is how I understand Arnold's avowedly dogmatic advice for choosing dogma.
1. Reject non-falsifiable theories -- Live by Karl Popper's dogma. (Should one therefore avoid all other dogmas?)
2. Reject the principle of authority -- Ipse dixit. (But can democracy thrive without wise deference, given that voters cannot possibly become competent in myriad complex policy areas?)
3. Reject ad hominem arguments.
4. Embrace the principle of charity in interpretation. (But don't wise people balance the principle of charity and 'the hermeneutics of suspicion' in interpretation, given that deception and self-deception are part of life?)
I was just reading Locke’s “Essays on the Law of Nature,” after reading this post. Locke’s definition of reason is whatever is “correctly derived from” true foundational beliefs (“certain definite principles of action” is how he puts it).
That makes the point that to the extent that our foundational beliefs are wrong, the rest of our reason falls apart.
Dogma is useful. "Murder is bad" is dogma. Jonah Goldberg has done some commentary on this.
University telos is dogma. Traditionally it was truth. "Lux et veritas" is on more than one university crest. Haidt says choose truth over social justice for university telos.
Left liberals used to be one of the major sets of guards of traditional university dogma. https://www.stephenhicks.org/2021/05/25/posners-excellent-crt-review/
"One of my foundational beliefs is that our attempts to arrive at complete empirical truth always fall short. " God exists. Or,
God does NOT exist.
Only one of these dogma beliefs is true. When people believe it, only one of them leads to optimal human happiness. It might be that optimal living and truth not quite the same.
Charles Murray is tweeting more about religion, and seeming to come to the opinion I have: without religious belief in absolutes, the reason oriented relativists inevitably degenerate into a Will To Power. I believe in God, but argue we can't know, empirically. (I doubt many specifics of Christianity - but accept we humans can never fully understand God.)
We can evaluate the lives of humans living with different views. It's pretty clear that those who are God-fearing religious folk, avoid more of the worst behaviors more often.
Sadly, the cultural norms that are an optimal trade-off of freedom & responsibility & well-being for low IQ folk, often called morals, seem to not be optimal for more capable high IQ folk. How important is sexual monogamy for marriage and raising kids? It's clear in the data that monogamous couples raise fewer problematic kids - but the cultural norm is moving away from that, to the detriment especially of kids with lower SES parents.
I'm more comfy talking more about trade-offs, than arguing about the truth/falseness of particular foundational beliefs. The world's discussions, not so much here, would be better with more explicit trade-offs noted.
Deep questions! Some thoughts...
There is a movement afoot lately to show that instead of foundational beliefs, one should think about foundational rules for what to believe, and that these can be justified by showing that they're conducive to accuracy. Richard Pettigrew is a central figure in this approach. Personally I don't think you can get enough out of it to be satisfying, but it is interesting.
My own view is that you have to supplement these rules with some foundational, obvious epistemic assumptions, like Occam's Razor. So these would be the only "dogma" that one ought to believe. Someone like eg Jennifer Lackey might say that principles about when to accept what other people say would belong in the dogma, but these don't seem like rock-bottom principles to me.
There is also the question of whether there ought to be foundations at all, or whether you simply start with whatever belief system you have and try to make it more coherent and empirically successful by modifying it. Quine was a "coherentist" in this sense.
Nice!