09 June 2025 - Thoughts

• Today I'm working on post #2 in my series on intellectual virtue. This will examine the words of Michael Huemer.
• Yesterday I posted quotes and some responses to Joe Schmid's words on intellectual virtue. I'm basically in total agreement, especially with the idea that virtue is the foundation of critical thinking. Where does philosophy begin? It begins with psychology, with the kind of person you are. If you are the kind of person who wants answers to philosophical questions, then you are the right kind of person for doing philosophy. If you are the kind of person who wants truth, then there are certain practices and attitudes you will take on to maximize your chances of finding the truth and ensuring that you are not stuck in falsehoods. 
• Disagreements: I will probably take a different approach to defining virtue, and I also clashed somewhat with the idea that there is always room for rational disagreement (even on complex topics). Depending on how we define rationality, rational disagreement is not possible; at least one person believes on the basis of false reasons. But you cannot blame someone for believing on the basis of false reasons, especially when the person is not believing on the basis of intellectual vices like wishful thinking or social pressure.
• There are two senses of blame here. On the first sense, you cannot blame anyone at all ever for any of their beliefs, because you cannot blame someone for their intelligence, knowledge, and so on. We do not choose our beliefs and we do not choose what makes sense to us. On the second sense, you can "blame" someone in the sense of acknowledging that there is something this person lacks. Some kinds of believing will reveal more of a lack than others. There is rational disagreement in the sense that people can disagree without lacking anything other than knowledge, which doesn't speak badly about the person qua truthseeker. Other kinds of disagreement involve a lack of intellectual virtue, which does speak badly about the person qua truthseeker.
• I had written some on tribalism in general and tribalism within Christianity, inspired by Joe's remarks on tribalism, but those writings have been lost. I think the gist of what I had to say was that 1) Tribalism involves us-versus-them thinking, echo chambers, socially reinforced beliefs (believing not because something makes sense, but because you will be socially punished otherwise), sophistry (saying words for the effect the words have on others, not for the truth of the words), heuristics, group psychology, ego, defensiveness, identity, group identity, doing things not because they are good or true but because they help the tribe and help your standing within the tribe, and a number of other pernicious things that I don't currently remember. 2) Tribalism thus causes intellectual vice and thus impedes truthseeking. 3) Tribalism is a problem that cannot be solved because humans depend on tribes for their survival. Even being a truthseeker runs the risk of falling into tribalist traps with "us truthseekers vs those irrational non-truthseekers" way of thinking. 4) The closest to a solution is to be radically socially independent. But this is impossible in most cases. Either you depend on family for survival, or you depend on a job. Both cases involve social structures and social structures are tribes. Survival and (philosophical) truthseeking sadly come apart in many ways, which is why humans are so overwhelmingly bad at philosophy. 5) You can try to select or procure a tribe that is the least tribalistic, but it's hard to see how tribalism can be fully eliminated. Being aware of tribalism and selecting or procuring a tribe in a strategic way can mitigate or even eliminate some of tribalism's worst effects. But how far can that go? It seems to me that tribalism is a fundamental feature of human nature. You could say that ego death is necessary to defeat tribalism. But how can someone undergo an ego death and continue living in this world as if you are concerned about your own survival? To live just is to live as a surviving thing, a thing concerned about its survival. How can you both undergo an ego death and be a thing concerned about its survival? 
• I will discuss virtue more broadly when I get to Aristotle.
• After this series I would like to do a brief series on Plato and Aristotle. That will be quick to put together as I've already done most of the work.
• I have Huemer's new book on knowledge, so that's on the to-read list. I will probably go into knowledge after mistakes and autonomous facts. Some things to discuss there: a priori vs a posteriori knowledge; analyticity vs tautology; laws of logic; justification.
• I gave a definition of justification that said a belief is justified when there are good reasons to believe it. Reasons are answers to why questions. I also said explanations are answers to why questions too, and so reasons and explanations are connected. (On one reading of 'reason', reasons are more internal, something the self is aware of. On a reading of 'explanation', explanations are external, existing independently of someone's awareness. There's an explanation for why fire is hot even if no one knows it. But there is an externalist reading of reasons too.)
• This means there's probably some way to reconcile explanationism—the view that knowledge is when you believe something because it's true—with the view that justification is based on reasons.
• Both explanationism and justification-by-reasons can probably be reconciled with some kind of foundationalism, and indeed might depend on some kind of foundationalism. I'm aware that Huemer is a foundationalist. I find the view attractive, as alternatives like skepticism and coherentism seem mistaken.