{"id":10409,"date":"2011-08-26T12:26:56","date_gmt":"2011-08-26T12:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/08\/26\/two-kinds-of-critical-caution\/"},"modified":"2011-08-26T12:26:56","modified_gmt":"2011-08-26T12:26:56","slug":"two-kinds-of-critical-caution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2011\/08\/26\/two-kinds-of-critical-caution\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Kinds of Critical Caution"},"content":{"rendered":"
One person fears loss of contact with reality and is willing to take doxastic risks and believe beyond what he can claim strictly to know. The other, standing firm on the autonomy of human reason, refuses to accept anything that cannot be justified from within his own subjectivity. He fears error, and finds the first person uncritical, gullible, credulous, tender-minded in James' sense.  The first is cautious lest he miss out on the real.  The second is cautious lest he make a mistake.<\/span><\/div>\n
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The second, brandishing W. K. Clifford,  criticizes the first  for believing on insufficient evidence, for self-indulgently believing what he wants to believe, for believing what he has no right <\/em>to believe. The second wants reality-contact only on his own terms: only if he can assure himself of it, perhaps by \u2018constituting\u2019 the object via \u2018apodictic\u2019 processes within his own consciousness. (Husserl) The first person, however, is willing to accept uncertainty for the sake of a reality-contact otherwise inaccessible. <\/span><\/div>\n
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What should we fear more, loss of contact with objective reality, or being wrong?<\/span><\/div>\n
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Analogy.  Some are gastronomically timorous: they refuse to eat in restaurants for fear of food poisoning.  Their critical abstention does indeed achieve its prophylactic end — but only at the expense of the  foregoing of a world of prandial delights.<\/span><\/div>\n
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Now suppose a man believes in God and afterlife but is mistaken.  He lives his life in the grip of what are in reality, but unbeknownst to him,  life-enhancing illusions.  And of course, since he is ex hypothesi<\/em> wrong, death cannot set him straight: he is after dying  nothing and so cannot learn that he lived his life in illusion.  But then why is his being wrong such a big deal?  Wouldn't it be a much bigger deal if his fear of being wrong prevented his participation in an unsurpassably great good?<\/span><\/div>\n
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"But he lived his life in the grip of illusions!"<\/span><\/div>\n
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To this I would respond, first: how do you know<\/em> that he lived his life in untruth?  You are always demanding evidence, so what is your evidence for this?  Second, in a godless universe could there even be truth? (No truth without mind; no objective truth without objective mind.)  Third, even if there is truth in a godless universe, why would it be a value?  Why care about truth if it has no bearing on human flourishing?  Doesn't your concern for evidence only make sense in the context of a quest for truth?<\/span> <\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One person fears loss of contact with reality and is willing to take doxastic risks and believe beyond what he can claim strictly to know. The other, standing firm on the autonomy of human reason, refuses to accept anything that cannot be justified from within his own subjectivity. He fears error, and finds the first … Continue reading “Two Kinds of Critical Caution”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[372,143,128],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-belief","category-god","category-reason-and-rationality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}