What is the Challenge of Cultural Diversity and Philosophical Pluralism?
In referring to cultural diversity I am pointing to the many aspects of different ethnicities, religious groups and social minorities. There are so many clashes of ideas in the global climate of cultural change. I was thinking about this area especially in reading, 'Philosophy Now' (February- March 2023), which explores the ideas of reason, knowledge and belief, including the relationship between postmodernism and science.
In one article, 'Postmodern Flames in Brazil', Marco's A Rapaso queries the relationship between science and postmodernism. He argues that, ' the postmodern condition can be described, in a nutshell, as a disillusionment with the great overreaching explanations of the world, including religion and science.' He argues that absolute truth has become questionable. Also, he suggests that, 'in times of liquid modernity, artificial intelligence', historical narratives and science act as 'anchors which allow us to keep in touch with the real world.'
So, I am asking what do you think about making sense in the maze of philosophical pluralism? Also, to what extent is philosophy a quest for reason, a search for personal meaning or connected to power balances or imbalances in social structures?
In one article, 'Postmodern Flames in Brazil', Marco's A Rapaso queries the relationship between science and postmodernism. He argues that, ' the postmodern condition can be described, in a nutshell, as a disillusionment with the great overreaching explanations of the world, including religion and science.' He argues that absolute truth has become questionable. Also, he suggests that, 'in times of liquid modernity, artificial intelligence', historical narratives and science act as 'anchors which allow us to keep in touch with the real world.'
So, I am asking what do you think about making sense in the maze of philosophical pluralism? Also, to what extent is philosophy a quest for reason, a search for personal meaning or connected to power balances or imbalances in social structures?
Comments (40)
Richard Rorty argued that cultural politics has replaced reformist politics, meaning that multiple groups are now engaged in their own preoccupations about rights while the larger concerns of class, like housing, employment, healthcare no longer engage broadly as they should. Personally the primary thing I am aware of is that society seems so atomized and divided that substantive reform seems ever harder to achieve. Which probably suits powerful interest groups pretty well.
As you implied, philosophical pluralism seems to be related to political pluralism. Pre-civilized groups tended to be egalitarian. But as urbanized societies increased in complexity, their governing organization became more hierarchical, and top-down tyranny was the norm (e.g. Pharaohs). However, today, for our global civilization, interconnected by a cacophony of electronic communications, neither Athenian Democracy nor European Fascism are practical solutions to the exigencies of social order for eight billion people.
Likewise, introspective Socratic philosophy was doable in democratic Athenian agora, but could be shouted-down from all sides on a modern internet forum. There may be too many competing & fragmented perspectives for any system to reach a practical dominant or compromise position. So, just as political systems are forced to become de-centralized, philosophical systems are wandering in a disorienting labyrinth of logic with many dead-end branches. Socrates no longer has the singular authority he once provided for the babble of argumentative philosophers. Even for a small group like TPF, there is no center of mass to stabilize the ship of Theseus. :smile:
PS__I hope this doesn't sound too pessimistic. Maybe the sheer mass of collective meanings (wisdom of the crowd) will serve to keep the Ark of Philosophy on an even keel. :joke:
"Let a hundred philosophies bloom"
The Hundred Flowers Campaign, also termed the Hundred Flowers Movement, was a period from 1956 to 1957 in the People's Republic of China during which the Chinese Communist Party encouraged citizens to openly express their opinions of the Communist Party. ___Wikipedia
Who's in charge here?
I see it as a boon to reason. With a greater conformity it was much easier to submit to the general consensus whereas now, given the myriad of doctrines, one is nearly always forced to think for oneself, or risk being pulled every which way like a windsock. The decentralization of knowledge is a paradigmatic moment history will remember.
That's an interesting phrase - is that your own formulation?
Im probably not the only one to use the phrase.
The whole "scientism" vs. "post-modernism" debate is subsumed by existentialism. That is to say, at heart, we are creatures that can do what we don't feel like doing by way of reasons (to ourselves). So, I don't want to work, but I must if I want to survive. I make a narrative to myself (aka a "reason"), and then this becomes my narrative for why I must carry on. But I don't have to. I can technically quit working, and even starve myself. But the rubber hits the pavement, so to say, once the realities of starvation and imminent death are lurking. So here is the "science", that is to say, applied sciences in the form of engineering/technological applications to keep us alive.
So we know at least two things regarding human will:
1) We can create reasons that overcome preferences.
2) We generally don't like pain and hunger and destitution.
Most strife and conflicts come from this. The "modernism" of science represents a sort of historical trajectory that of the underpinning of our survival and ways of life. The "post-modernism" is the desiderata reasons we push and pull at that provide personal motivations to keep using the tools that the scientific apparatus has provided.
Everything is text is post-modernism's stance. However, starvation is a bitch. The "meta-narrative" of the "modernism" haunts the post-modern because as "relativistic" as you want to go, it goes back to that starvation and the use of the scientific apparatus. The meta-narrative wins.
I didn't fully discover my love of philosophy until my late 20s. A big part of this was the overwhelming diversity of the field. The field seemed almost impenetrable for the crushingly long list of "great names," each with their own unique systems, each with hundreds, or often thousands, of pages of incredibly dense pages to grapple with.
If I reflect back on my undergraduate classes, and my early periods of self study, the problem was a focus on chronologically pushing through authors. I don't think this is a great way to learn philosophy. This is not how we teach biology or chemistry. Nor is it how we teach mathematics, another abstract field, or literary studies, another discipline within the humanities. In biology, we might describe how certain discoveries were made, review debunked theories and how they were falsified, etc. but we don't slog through the progress of biological theories from Aristotle on.
I bring this up because I began to get a lot more out of my studies when I began using topical books (e.g. Routledge and Oxford companions) on specific areas of philosophy that interested me. After reading those, I'd be able to go out and find journal articles on specific problems that caught my eye and I'd have a better idea of the authors who I wanted to look into.
What these guides gave me was a "lay of the land." Most "Introductions to...", "Companions to...", and SEP entries have a typology of sorts. They map the area in question, and define a rough list of camps. This is reductive and misses nuanced, but it is essential. A developed field has a common nomenclature. It normally has some landmark papers that have helped define the "camps" on a given issue.
This is true in the sciences and it seems even more true in philosophy. Because philosophy is more abstract, with looser borders than pretty much any other discipline, this sort of scaffolding is essential. Philosophy is in many ways a conversation, and a conversation requires a common language.
Moreover, it's a conversation of very complex ideas. Here compression is also essential. Identifiers like "terminators," or "the semantic camp," can act as short hand for an entire complex set of ideas. This sort of compression is essential because the mind simply doesn't have the bandwidth to unpack every idea, you'll lose the thread of an argument doing that, and it will take forever to write it. Logical notation plays a similar role.
I notice this same sort of need to compress data to manipulate it in the programing and database work I do as well.
This is why I don't really like arguments about "blowing up philosophy," or starting from the ground up again. Yes, the field is full of bloated, sometimes quite bad writing, but if you want to effectively communicate on very complex ideas you need to have a shared language and it doesn't make sense to ignore the existing systems for that.
I think philosophy can be all of these things. Reason itself is more basic. When we seek to understand power imbalances and social structures we use reason. We have to assume these systems are intelligible to us and that within them one thing follows from another in a comprehendible manner, else how could we even say that such imbalances exist?
I don't think I necessarily agree. The problem with the proliferation of access to digital information, and the ability to create and spread digital information rapidly is the potential shift in the signal to noise ratio in our culture. More isn't necessarily better. For example, if a doctor can now have access to 10 times as many studies as she had before, but now 55% are likely to be garbage instead of just 15%, the new technology doesn't seem like a benefit. What we care about is finding out what we want to know, and having more to sift through can be a major barrier to that.
I think the second problem is that truth is not necessarily advantageous for the survival and reproduction of digital information. There are tons of articles, memes, videos, etc. in our digital ecosystem. What reproduces and spreads to more hosts is not necessarily veritical information. Salacious gossip, long debunked partisan diatribes, etc. all seem to replicate very well "in the wild." Sources that are supposed to vet knowledge have problems too, e.g. publication biased, novelty bias, etc.
And since we exist in a sort of epistemic web, a web increasingly shaped by search and content promotion algorithms, where the veracity of one claim is reliant on another source, more voices can just become more noise.
Since I am definitely not a professional philosopher, and might not even be an half-assed amateur at it, I stay out of tedious postmodern mazes. I am not especially interested in diversity and pluralism, and at this stage in my life, it doesn't matter. Hey, I'm almost over, and I'm OK with that. (Well, sort of. Not much choice, come to think of it.).
Quoting schopenhauer1
A nice pairing. It shoots down the literary balloon and then nails it with a jagged icicle.
So much of the serious talk of the times dissolves into the hot air of intellectual dithering when confronted by the indifference of nature--birth, eat, starve, death, rinse and repeat ad infinitum. [Work! Strive! Persevere! You are all victims of a monstrous hoax!)
Quoting NOS4A2
Is knowledge actually "decentralized", or is it merely being distributed far more widely than 100 years ago? I don't think the generation of significant knowledge has been decentralized, and I'm not sure it should be. A large group of institutions harbor a lot of the knowledge creators, and they further nurture them. Good thing, because significant knowledge creation is hard work. One needs labs, libraries, and colleagues.
True enough, a volunteer archeologist can hike out into the field and find something quite important. A number of significant finds in England have happened this way. Someday a janitor might find the lost Ark of the Covenant in the attic of a remotely located Vatican warehouse. Serendipity happens in a very decentralized way.
Thank you, sir! :smile:.
Quoting BC
Nice turn of phrase and, yes exactly.
Thats a good point. But it isnt necessarily worse, either. Its not only that we have more access to information, we also have better access to the means of publication. Personally, I would rather wade through landfills of propaganda than lose the access to this technology. Its just now we have to equip ourselves with the skills to deliberate our way through it. That may take some time and training, but so much the better.
There is currently an effort by those in power to criminalize misinformation. That way lies State Truth, and it has invariably led to human rights violations.
You might be right. Those with greater resources will create for themselves more access to hearts and minds. But I think the tide is turning. Who knows? Maybe future archeologists will be searching through forums like this one day and laugh at how primitive we were.
Quoting Jack Cummins
Well, for starters, I'm numerate ... sophistry & dogma don't confuse me.
Please rephrase or reformulate this question.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Can you explain what mechanisms you think were in place to prevent these two issues prior to the opening up of digital information. Say, when one had to search through journals manually (perhaps with the aid of library catalogue), what was it previously preventing one's search from having high signal to noise ratios, or from being prone to influences other than veracity?
It does seem that there is a lot of confusion about who is in charge or control as roles in social life have become more and more fuzzy. Power shifts a lot, especially as people change organisational roles. It is likely that this effects the way people hold beliefs and values as they shift within different structures and cultures of knowledge and ideologies.
I have probably been through a lot of postmodern mazes. In particular, I found Foucault's ideas on sexuality very helpful, especially in conjunction with questioning religious beliefs.
The line which you queried with the words, 'is reason a quest for reason' was actually a typo in my outpost. It should have read as 'is philosophy a quest for reason', so I will alter it when I look at the thread a little later today.
You also seem to prefer the concept relativism in favour of pluralism. The reason why I choose pluralism, which is similar because it is more about competing 'truths' rather than these simply being simply relative. The idea of competing truths was the way pluralist was used by William James in, 'The Pluralistic Universe'.
The Ark of Philosophy can be like The Tower of Babel at times. It may also be because in the information age there is so much to access and put together from different times and cultures. In the issue of 'Philosophy Now' from which I read the article on postmodernism and science, there is also another relevant one, 'Bricolage: Natural Epistemology. The term was looked at by Claude Levi Strauss, as meaning '"to tinker' as a way of putting things together creatively. In a way, it can be seen as reconstruction as opposed to the process of deconstruction in postmodernism.
Well yes... that seems to be quite a tall order for anyone to expect one absolute truth that explains everything... and fits neatly into your pocket! Seems doomed to fall very short. Which might not be a problem, if one didnt bet the house on it. Your mention of bricolage (tinkering and assembling) later is a much more realistic and practical approach. Trying to find some key of ultimate knowledge is perhaps understandable when a particular person wonders what everything is about. Where do we come from? Where are we going? You know... philosophical questions and dialogue.
But in the hands of those simply seeking to rule, and gain more power, control, and rewards... the search for the key of knowledge is more like wanting the one ring of power. CONQUER ALL! CONTROL ALL! CONSUME ALL! CRUSH ALL OPPOSITION! (They would say). That entity which rules us now seems less like a human or group. Its more like a machine that issues commands like the fearsome Wizard of Oz which its servants (our leaders) follow unthinkingly. Or it is like a enormous devouring beast, kept in a cage and tended by high priests who maintain power with this beast.
One wonders: what is the ACTUAL philosophy of the decision-makers? Not the public relations version, but a record of actual practical philosophy or policy. Might make Machiavellis Prince look like St. Francis. Dystopian fiction might describe the overall situation better than sociology or other academic disciplines (though changing the details). Or for the more literal-minded and unimaginative: acceptance of even the most unlikely conspiracy theories as concrete fact.
I see. The correction still confuses me, though differently. If philisophy is a form of reason (re: reflective), how is "a quest for reason", in this sense, anything but chasing its own tail (à la trying to lift oneself off the ground by one's own hair)? To my mind philosophy is a quest for understanding ...
Given your question, Jack, it seemed to me more relevant to associate "competing" with relative (e.g. multiple dogmas) instead of complementary suggesting plurality (e.g. multiple versions of the same X). Then again, a "maze" consists of multiple paths, which complement one another, so "pluralism" after all. :chin:
:100: Yes! Definitely! Let the Philosophies bloom, mingle, party, eat and drink, mate, and have many offspring. This also applies to the arts and music, writing, and science (especially the experimental and underfunded varieties. IE those that dont directly lead to weapons and wealth).
There was more vetting at each level when the cost to share information were higher. Publishing companies don't tend to publish Holocaust denial literature for example and libraries don't tend to stock it. Obviously, random wackos ran plenty of newsletters about all manner of things before the internet existed, but they were difficult to access, didn't proliferate as quickly, and were far less common than social media accounts today.
Think about the difference between being an author or publisher and being merely a reader. Now it is much easier to become an author or republish. This has some great benefits, but also some negative ones.
It was also easier to trace the source of information before. You could call publishers, find microfilm of old sources, etc.
Now, in many, many ways it IS now easier to do this sort of thing due to searchable databases, right? I personally have found so. The problem is that it is also way easier to fake data in ways that are extremely difficult to detect.
I'll try to dig up a good example on this where Bill Binney, formerly of the CIA, was manipulated into thinking evidence of the DNC email hack being done locally existed. It involved a single person creating multiple fake identities to feed doctored information to vulnerable people whose credentials would help boost the signal of their fake information.
Now adversarial AI networks can help you create fake videos and photos to establish fake identities. It is easy to take real data sets, which naturally look believable, and doctor them to get regression results you like to push a narrative. Certainly, this sort of stuff happened before, but the tools to create fake content are far more powerful than before. Our sensory systems isn't designed to deal with realistic deep fake videos, etc. Hell, even the proliferation of people with grad degrees without a commensurate increase in demand for their skills has boosted this problem; if it is publish or perish, and you have a family to support, changing some cell values over to support something you already think is true doesn't seem so bad.
Of course, most fake information isn't particularly sophisticated. It's easily identifiable bullshit, but that goes right to my point. This stuff replicates because it is what people want to see, it appeals to emotions. It's the reason a stirring picture of disaster X in 2013 spreads like wildfire while being represented as from disaster Y in 2023. My basic argument is that information undergoes natural selection and that truth is not necessarily, or even normally a trait that benefits reproduction.
Digital technology has made it less costly to reproduce information. Thus, there is less of an incentive to only duplicate quality information, to vet things before reproduction. This in turn changes the dynamics such that the share of veritical information goes down.
Even aside from this, sometimes having too many sources and options to read is overwhelming, and this alone hurts knowledge acquisition.
You recall David Irving? Was he not published and stocked? I get the argument you're making about vetting, but you're trying to make an argument about "veracity" using an argument about vetting. What's the link between vetting and veracity? What mechanism ensured vetting was in favour of veracity, and not, for example, protection from litigation, or profit?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Now you're equating fringe with untrue, but again, you've not given the mechanism whereby more mainstream views are more likely to be true. Prior to the internet, fewer fringe views would have been available, that's true, but your argument wasn't about popularity, it was about veracity.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Also very true, but once more, your argument wasn't that it is easier now, it's that "veracity" is reduced. You've not given a link between a job being hard to get and the output from that job being more likely to be true. It's very hard to get a job as a spy, for example, but their job is to lie.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This one I agree with the mechanism on, but I can't really see the argument for the scope. Who was ever routinely checking sources prior to the internet age? Where were the source checks when virtually every newspaper in America parroted the lie about Iraq's WMDs? The invasion was carried by a wave of popular support on the basis of utter fabrication which the slightest verification of sources could have shown, but no-one bothered.
Also, whilst I think what you say about sources might apply to twitter, or facebook, it can hardly be said to apply to modern blogging. Here, for example, is Caitlin Johnstone's latest blog https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/03/21/john-boltons-prominence-in-the-media-proves-our-entire-society-is-diseased/ a typically polemic piece from her, but it is literally littered with links to the sources of all of her statements. Something you could never get in a newspaper. I can trace every single one of her sources with a click.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You've given a really interesting example of modern data faking, which I appreciate, but you've not shown comparatively how it is 'easier', only different. Whilst there's a lot of 'deep fake' material now, the internet has also made it much easier to track down evidence to the contrary. It's much harder to fake a communication when one can access texts, whatsapps, emails, voicemails etc which might contradict the fake. Compare to a telegram, or a letter which, when faked, would most likely be the only copy of that communication.
On the whole, though, I'm persuaded by this one.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I get this, but I don't see an argument that it ever was otherwise. The mechanisms by which information was propagated might have been different, but the qualities of information selected for promulgation were always the same.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
As above. The cost of producing information makes it more imperative that the production of that information generate a return on that investment. I don't see how that has anything to do with its veracity. If anything, given what you say about "what people want to see", it seems very unlikely, on its face, that someone contemplating the high cost of publishing information would care much about its veracity, compared to it's likely reception.
A good point that is often missed. You can have multiple true explanations of the same phenomena. E.g., a mechanic, an engineer, and a physicist can all explain how a car works using true propositions, but that doesn't mean their explanations will be the same. When you get to very complex phenomena, such as the function of various organs, relatively true explanations (i.e. based on well vetted research) from different levels of analysis may even seem to be contradictory.
Relativism is also tricky in that it can be taken to imply that there is no truth, or alternatively, that the truth or falsity of positions depends on context.
I am not sure that it matters entirely whether the term pluralism or relativism are used because it is about competing perspectives. Thinking about it more, the way I see it is that truth, reason or understanding are based on experience. This does depend on knowledge but there is a political dimension to this. Within social science and cultural studies there is recognition of intersectionality which involves social and categories as aspects of this, which affect perception of this. Of course, each person is a unique person in an ongoing process of structuring a philosophy outlook but intersectionality is likely to have some bearing on this.
I am glad that you recognise the way in which construction of views is based on social and political factors. This probably occurs in many unconscious ways, with people having different ways of realising or acknowledging such biases and various prejudices which may come into play.
The cultural climate varies historically and geographically. It is also linked to the role of academic institutions, such as the general changes in allegiance to worldviews. In the light of science, postmodernism and other influences like existentialism and science, there may be a void. It may be that it is here that so much is seen as fictive, as a background for the emergence of 'post-truth'.
It depends on what you mean by "philosophy". If you mean by this word, what "ordinary" people commonly regard as "that's my philosophy", then philosophical pluralism is indeed helpful and enlightening, for the trivial reason that we learn about how other cultures deal with issues similar to ours. And often with issues that aren't ours.
Now, if you mean by "philosophy" the tradition going back to Plato, then it's more nuanced. I'd say it's good to have a "reasonable" amount of plurality - it gives us different options to consider. But going from a reasonable amount to "anything goes" is very different. If we allow an anything goes attitude into philosophy in this sense, then we are severely degrading the tradition, because we are allowing too much garbage in.
Your second question depends on what your interests in philosophy are. But it's legitimate to tackle all those questions.
I guess that the use of the term and approach to it is so variable, ranging from the academic to the popular. In the tradition of Plato it may have been more about self-knowledge. That is not to say that many who approach disregard self-knowledge and the understanding of the nature of reality. However, the outer aspects of philosophy may be more about the ability to persuade and to offer credible and valid arguments. In that sense, philosophy can become almost a competition of power.
This may not be all that plurality involves but it does involve the politics of philosophy. That is in addition to the many possibilities of constructing worldviews, and all the many different angles and rational constructed arguments.
I think one's commitment to a philosophical position or way of life can be "based on experience" but "truth, reason or understanding", which constitute doing philosophy, are not themselves "based on experience".
While the aporia with which one's inquiries and thinking begin might be functions of, or related to, one's bio-social psychology, the "philosophical outlook" which might follow is no more dependent on, or validated by, how aporia are selected than a mathematical theorem is dependent on how its axioms are selected or a musical composition is dependent on how its scale, notes & key-changes are selected. That seems a genetic fallacy, Jack.
The comment about the competition of power reminds me a bit of Plato's dislike of the Sophists, who argued for the sake of winning an argument, not for any inherent goodness or correctness. I believe we still have that around in philosophy, particularly in the "Deconstruction" tradition, and some aspects of postmodernism generally.
I can understand political philosophy - but philosophy itself being political, is not entirely clear. Some branches are - ethics say, or maybe even some aspect of aesthetics. But I don't see a reason as to why metaphysics, epistemology, logic, language, etc. are in themselves political or about power.
They can be depending on how they are used, but I don't see a necessity to it.
Perhaps you have something else in mind.
You're quite right about the same incentives to reproduce inaccurate information existing before the digital agent. I don't mean to put that forward as any sort of golden era.
However, reputation, information about the source of any data, plays a role in how people consume and replicate that data. Setting up a print publishing company and building a reputation comes with considerable opportunity costs. Setting up social media accounts can be done by the tens of thousands with bots for next to nothing.
I will use two examples here:
First, when the Islamic State first rebranded from Al Qaeda in Iraq and began taking significant amounts of territory it made world news. Lots of reporters went to cover the story. People in the region had phones and shared their own media. Major outlets covered the rise of IS, as well as small bloggers.
Twitter, with 305 million daily users in 2015, represented a major source for information worldwide, I believe the 4th most visited site at the time. Throughout that year until major censorship efforts were put in place, pro-Islamic State propaganda, often reposts of official propaganda, dominated trends related to the region.
Partly this was people's willingness to share gruesome content, but bots played a huge role, such that major crackdowns on bots drastically reduced the frequency of propaganda being shared. This is a case were a relatively small cadre (most of Twitters membership is not IS boosters) was able to boost their signal, making it equivalent to the actions of millions of people through automation.
For a more indepth look, there is Yannic Kilcher's highly questionable project where he trained a GPT-4 model on millions of posts from the hate/racism section of 4chan. He then proceeded to let the bot loose on the site for 24 hours. During this period, one person, spending next to nothing, was able to control 10% of all content on a social media network with 22 million monthly users.
Buying a printer has nothing on running a bot net. Then you also have to consider that in the digital era, it's like everyone owns their own printer and photocopier, and has it in their pocket 24/7, meaning such efforts can spread out from your initial manufactured surge. And whereas most people ignore leaflets dropped all over the street, people do pay attention to leaflets given to them by people they know.
Wow, that is a truly terrifying example. One certainly can't trust Twitter for news (despite the alarming number of people doing so).
But...
Would it have had a greater or lesser effect, do you think, if all of the mainstream media outlets in the region came out in favour of IS?
The fact is that the mainstream media in most countries is owned by a smaller and smaller number of individuals or corporations, in many countries the government is still one of those.
Your "one person, spending next to nothing, was able to control 10% of all content", is absolutely no different to the position of Rupert Murdoch, or Larry Fink, or Chris Ripley... Only with those guys it's more like 50-70%.
I think what you're conflating is power and extremism. The way social media works gives extremists more power than they had before, but that power still pales into insignificance compared to the power of the tiny cabal of owners responsible for mass media. Their preferred message is not extremist, but that doesn't make it more true. Veracity and non-extremism are not necessarily linked. Imagine if your IS 'influencers' were instead the only group speaking out against the totally mainstream rise in antisemitic nationalism in the 1930s. Wouldn't you be glad they had a tool to artificially amplify their voice?
In terms of power, as has been noted, the reach and influence of social media in terms of extremism is quite small - https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aau4586 https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/our-research/measuring-reach-fake-news-and-online-disinformation-europe
Compare that to the reach of newspaper like the Times.
I think fundamentally there's a error here conflating the tools with the intention. A hammer can help build a house or commit a murder, the key is the intent of the user.
In an ideal world, no one would act in such a way as to artificially misrepresent, but, given that they do, what matters is the power of the tool they use to do so, and it remains true (for the time being at least) that the most powerful tool for those intent on misrepresentation is still mainstream media.
Apposite at the moment (20yr anniversary) is a discussion about the role mainstream media played in easing America and Britain's path to a basically illegal invasion of Iraq. We could have done with a few more alternative voices back then.
If Natural Evolution theory can be applied to Cultural Evolution, a postmodern plethora of optional forms should not matter in the long run. The competition between doctrines & ideologies will grind each other down to a few viable forms & frames. Unfortunately, those of us in the midst of the information explosion may have to find our way through the labyrinth without threads or breadcrumbs. But for me, I find the fundamental foundations of the early Greek philosophers to be a simplifying sifter. :smile:
As far as the interaction between philosophy and experience it may be complicated because although knowledge is not based on experience it may affect interpretation. For example, it was difficult experiences, including 2 friends committing suicide, which led me to question and question religion in a way which I had never done before. Of course, it is possible that I was getting to the point of questioning anyway and that experience simply speeded this up. I know that you got to the point of questioning while you were still at school when you gave up 'God' for lent. But, was the decision based simply on the basis of the rationality alone, or irrationally of the idea of God?
The Sophists definitely saw winning arguments as essential. So, I sometimes think about that when reading some threads on this site, and I am sure that is how it is in many circles of philosophy.
I see what you mean about areas such as metaphysics, logic and epistemology not being political intrinsically. Nevertheless, such ideas may be used politically, especially with metaphysical ideas such as belief in God and life after death being used for political ends. However, it may be that genuine philosophy exploration is able to go beyond underlying political agendas and values.
If someone is being honest, say, a religious person or scholar, they can use metaphysical arguments for political ends and even do this in good faith, that is, being clear about what goals they may have and what motives fuels them to action.
If someone is concerned with using metaphysics or epistemology to try and figure out what there is fundamentally in the universe, let it be fields of energy, miniscule mental entities or moments of perceptions, etc., then I don't see how politics can enter here in any meaningful sense of the word.
This does not make the latter is better than politically motivated ideas, it simply has a different emphasis in terms of what is covered and what is left out.
After years of bible study, church history, and the history of the making of the bible as well as its uses in politics for over a millennia, I could not find anymore evidence for Christianity's claims than I could for those of Greco-Roman religious myths, for example, or could not distinguish rationally between "Jesus & Thor" or "Yahweh & Zeus". Perhaps it was, as the Church teaches, I'd simply lacked "grace" and realized that during my Jesuit high school years. :pray: Losing my religion, Jack, was certainly the catalyst for my life-long interest in philosophy (i.e. reflective reasoning & conduct) and not the other way around. :fire:
I am not sure that I really experienced much of a sense of 'grace' when I lived a 'religious life'. I used to go to Christian Union as a student and feel so 'different' from most of those around me. I was a bit taken aback by the way in which people were so opposed to other religious perspectives outside of Christianity and it does sound as you saw parallel ideas of other notions of God. I guess that I just didn't end up 'losing my religion' (great song by REM) in such a clear cut way. I have had many shifts and still experience them, but with more of an interest in comparative religion, but also with the whole area of interaction between spirituality and religion. Philosophy seems to fit into that as a foundation for rational examination of ideas and arguments.
I am not convinced that the distinction between the fields of thought are simple because while people do have contradictions, there may be overlaps. For example, I see a link between the ideas of determinism, Dennett's 'consciousness as an illusion' and a rejection of the importance of 'inner reality'. That is because such ideas may lead to an emphasis on the external world and people being seen almost as machines or robots. Also, such a viewpoint is compatible with some kinds of neo-totalitarianism, with the possibility of people competing for performance.
Even within physics there are different perspectives on religion and on politics. The aspects of the political within science may come down to competing political angles amongst scientists and of funding of projects at higher levels of power structures.
It's interesting that you mention Dennett. I would agree that his views on consciousness being an illusion might lead one to think that he takes a deterministic view. But the opposite is the case. He defends compatibilism.
Yes - the ideas of eliminitavism can lead to the idea of man as machine, yet Dennett is a good liberal, so these things need not be connected. You are correct that such views can lead some to think of human beings as "mere" organisms, but these same people rarely act as if others were disposable insects.
The funding issue is interesting. We are not far from practical limits in terms of experiments we can do, and money is spent on few theories. This is expensive, and popular theories like String Theory or Quantum Gravity, get more funds than others, which are just as promising. Funders should be made aware of this, I don't assume they know this, a lot of the time.
There can be connections of the kind you suggest, but if you follow, say Foucault and his disciples, you will find extremely tenuous, and sometimes imaginary connections all related to obscure notions of "ideology". It's good to perceive structures of power. One should temper this with sober realism: real power structures are often out in the open, as seen in business journals and the like.
(Paraphrasing / plagiarizing Bataille? Cioran? Rosset? Zapffe?)
In hindsight, it's more apt to say that, in fact @16, I'd existentially decided on freethought thinking for myself as freely as I can from any anti/non/super-natural frameworks as well as 'appeals to authority, tradition, popularity, ignorance, incredulity, etc' than to say I'd decided I was an "atheist". Fully articulated and principled weak atheism (& materialism) came later, then several years further on via much study and some life experience strong atheism (& naturalism) and (finally?) more than a decade afterwards easing into my much scarred, bemused middle-age I'd found my antitheism (& ecstatic naturalism). However, my accompanying irreligion has always been 'spiritual' in the sense of reflectively living, for the most part, in a musically jubiliant (i.e. dionysian, absurdist, bluesy) way. Like the proverbial rollin' stone, Jack, the only 'grace' I've ever known (my gnosis!) is Sisyphusian grace, and, always by philosophical candle light, dining in the dark ruins of my noisy body and our mumbled words.