Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Britain's Black History Hoax (e.g. Stonehenge was NOT Built by Black People)" video.
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Part 1: It might seem a bit left field, but have the empirical sciences got anything at all to say about what it might be to be British or English. So, we might think now post enlightenment that all valid justifiable, legitimate, provable questions are questions for the empirical sciences or are questions about the logic mathematics and methodology. It maybe that we can get rid of this distinction this duality (eg Hume and Logical positivism) perhaps by asking if there can be an empirical answer to explain and account for the validity of logic and mathematics and methodology, this would be in approach of Quine, where for example the test of a valid methodology for science is itself a testable scientific question. But that is a bit odd, because this has really turned the question of solving the duality around. That is how can I test a scientific method without already presupposing a methodology framework to test some other methodological framework. That is we might think we can test a scientific methodology, make it a subject of scientific testing but the very idea of a scientific test presupposes a methodology for the test. Think, can a methodology test itself when even the test presupposes it as a kind of foundation. We may think this indicates no foundation at all, indicates a single origin fixed eternal methodology, indicates that we just use many different methods and not worry about a universal methodology for all, just be content with varieties of methodologies, just tested in terms of what works over a narrow region, and not seek the totality and integration of the different sciences and methodologies. That it science begins with questions of utility that are embedded in the contemporary situation and its requirements. We don't think of science as anything but a continually moving terrain of activities from "within" which are generated questions of imagined possibilities which seeks pragmatics solutions as a how to get tot he possibility and its utility. But this suggests the question and imagination are the origin of science even if situated and contextual. This might make the human mind and imagination not nature the God of science. Man his imagination of possibilities as images of ought's is the source of the sciences. But of course now we might think that man and his imagination is itself is a scientific question. That is even as itself an imaginative scientific question about the imagination.
Indeed the tradition of German Romanticism following its earlier enlightenment rationalism did move to making man and his imagination central to reason as indicative of freedom. Its central to Kant and Hegel and later Heidegger, that man is not just in possession of freedom as if we could turn it off or throw it away or lose it, rather man “belongs to freedom”. If science then is inseparable from man as constitutively free and fraught with imagination clearly man is not the kind of thing that could be an object of science even an imaginative and free science. You know you develop that rational taxation policy based on how people behave, and once to employ it, the people start to create “new imaginaries” of tax avoidance, then you have to add more details and more people to deal with the essentially anomalous thing that is man, and now its costs more to raise the review than the revenue. The laffer curve must apply also to the people working in the tax policy office, and even the people who developed the policy, hell, to laffer himself.
On the kinds of questions our imagination might come up with we might think this is a scientific question not about the brain but the social context of the scientist. Such that the questions might not even originate in the mind of the Genius scientist and their intuition like Faraday, but are questions raised by the needs of the social institutional and political world. This the kind of shift from the myth of the individual scientist confronting nature in wonder, to the view of the scientist as a member of a research project to do something, and that something is entirely determined by the social context in all its colours Lackatos. So before the laffer curve was the question why does massive taxation rates raise less money than small ones, and even can we find a reason to cut taxes, and even embracing man as free but with norms, we might indicate that if you don’t pay your taxes then we will have created empirical evidence to cut tax down to your avoidance scheme.
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Part 2: One of the rallying cries or rhetoric or pitch for science was that it will get rid of superstition and myths that were true and so create a world more in accord with truth and facts. But it seems that apart from the skilled salesmanship to cause and create a scientific community and scientific culture, it turn out science is rooted in myths of its own and that these are paradoxical for science and its claims of justification and legitimacy. In a way that there should become a science of man from Locke and Hume, after Newton, I not a mere addition of another science but is something necessary to the science’s objectivity since man seems constitutive of it, even if the science might retort that science constitutes man and society.
The problem from Husserl I think is man has to be put under scientific study as his nature is internal to the nature of science itself, but now his nature is presupposed in the paradoxical project of understanding that natural presupposition. This is a problem logically as in a deduction it appears the conclusion and the major premise are the same, its tautological, it is a problem empirically since if man empirically changes along with empirical nature at large then, we only have science in a narrow scope context. Ontologically its problematic since if man is belonging to freedom and imagination and so science too then science as attacking myths really just has myths of its own and paradoxical unpresentable myths. e.g. I might ask why is this guy doing this work? It is presented as a corrective to previous science, but also as demonstraiting that at least the perpetuation of that myth is a socio political act, ie. Under sttod as a “distortion or mediation of the facts by political agenders. We know this goes on because political and social psychological sciences tell us this is the sort of thing that goes on with people in institutions. But now we ask: who decided to scientifically investigate the scientific institutions and the scientists from what institution were they from and why would they want to look at this for what purpose and imagination.
The German and French 19th century anti rationalists who Critiqued Hegel positioned this critique originally as from Hegel the conflict between faith and reason, but as time went on its became apparent that the represented God could not be God (e.g. negative theology etc) and so God is not so much false as scientifically meaningless, and then explained as maybe the result of too much imagination or too much super structural ideology. Then really in the 20th century heir’s to this tradition of Critique in applying Critique and reflection to science itself is disclosed that, as above, science foundations and justifications and legitimacy itself is unpresentable. That was a surprise because the enlightenment science was meant to demythologise the world, but while on the one hand it adheres to its own myths (anti metaphysicians hold a unacknowledged metaphysical positions of their own), more significantly its has internal paradoxes of un-representability of their own.
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Part 3: We might be content in just using what ever tools and paradoxes to remove a myth or paradox that is there anyway, but this presents the science and tools of myth removal as if they do not go on to reshape the man and the world in the process, and place another version of the same paradox at its centre, its new institution and its new men.
Indeed in the late 20th and early 21 st century this German Idealist and Critical tradition was returned to by the far left. Suddenly the far left becomes interested in theological questions, not just to continue the Marxist materialist Critique of God and the use and role of theology as a class political tool an ideology but because the very scientific critique of theological myths of origins contains such myths of its own. But rather than seeking new foundations for their sciences outside of myth like realism or equilibrium differential pragmatism or Bayesian personalised justification, they embrace the radical paradox at the heart of science and reason and look to the “post-structural” similarities between negative theology, fideism, and the paradoxical foundations of science, that is a resemblance between he unpresentable God and the similarly unpresentable science that would be the pretender to his thrown. This is not just a debate about belief and atheism, for when Nietzsche said God is dead, he meant all origins and totalities so the world the State the constitution the right the person the atom, the fact the tautology. The agent cause and responsibility. Where previous materialism like Deleuze were seeking to dissolve these ontological objects, this new theological turn wants to make strange parallels between both as paradoxical in the same sort of way.
Remember Kierkegaard thought Lessing’s scientific enquires into the historical facts of the bible had nothing to do with ”it” or anyone’s belief and faith.
A book detailing one path here through to "Speculative Realism" is
“Difficult Atheism: Post Theological Thinking in Alan Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux” (Christopher Watkin 2011)
and you can read quite a lot of it for free on Google books. enjoy!
Thank you for the very interesting discussion Harrison Pitt, Evan Riggs, and Tom Rowsell.
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Appendix: I just want to point out that in my partial Critique of the biological material genetic projects here, i introduced by way German Idealism a path through recent left philosophy that goes, through arguments, to what is now called "Speculative Realism (Materialism)". My aim was not to recommend Speculative Realism, rather to point out that too much emphasis on naturalism at the cost of reducing or eliminating norms of reason, can end up as aligned with what is modern far left Communist positions of various Speculative Realisms. That is from the point of view of the scientific metaphysics of man, Communism metaphysics is close to biological naturalism. That is, they share a view from Hegel's Critique of Kant's finitude of man that there is, though removing limits to human reasoning we can propose a speculative metaphysics that goes beyond mans finitude. This then would be a position of both biological naturalism and materialist communism.
Indeed the Speculative Realism groups recognise this as only one path from the problem of man from a Kantian Hegelian provenance, and so seek to respond to other paths especially what they refer to as The Pittsburgh Hegelians. They are especially Robert Brandon and John McDowell but are traced back though Rorty to Wilfred Sellers and the myth of the given. Now Brandon and McDowell have emphasised the normative or right Sellarsian Hegelianism, while the left would want to exploit Sellers materialism and emphases this. What is at stake is clearly laid out in a footnote: Ray Brassier "Concepts and Objects" in "The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism" (Bryant, Srnicek, Harman 2011) page 50 notes 4, 5, 6 and see note 7: a quote from Sellars "The concept of "folk metaphysics", understood as the set of default conceptual categories in terms of which humans make sense of the world prior to any sort of theoretical reflection, is beginning to play an increasing role in cognitive science. Faces, persons, bodies, solid objects ,voluntary motion, cause and effect, are all examples of folk metaphysical categories in this sense. the implication is phenomenological ontology is simply folk metaphysics wrote large". ref by Brassier is to Sellars "Science and Metaphysics" p 173.
My Critical view of this neo Hegelian materialism view is you just cannot link the space of genetic changer or states to a face. My microbiologist friend explained genetics to me using playing cards for phenotypes and so on. a card value change has no analogue with a anything intuitive in a face. its bad metaphysics by bad analogy, there is no relation no isomorphism of the space of faces and the space of genetic change. Also i think not even then a state to state one to one token link say in Davidson’s anomalous monism. It makes no sense to talk of facial features in the logical space of history and material change. For a start its not really a science in the sense of physics because past counterfactuals are impossible and so we are limited and finite under provenance and destiny, but the material analysis would want to a make this a finite path actually cut though a forest of real possible nature other imagined possibility not actualised, all those creatures that never were. We can indeed draw imaginary cryptids but this is incongruent to genetic engineering, we cannot imagine what the human race or races will look like in a billion years times to much freedom in nature, and we cannot imagine or construct what a face would be like say if the dinosaurs were not extinct.
The other root from say Jean Luc Nancy commonly taken is to issues of creating communities a root though to Negri and Hardt and others. This is the path we have in say Bernard Harcourt “Critique and Praxis” (2020).
My root from Nancy is to link his discussions of experience back to contemporary discussions of experience say in Robert Pippin and McDowell.
Just a note according to Badiou some the motivation for the Speculative Turn away from finitude was the subjectivism of Kantian finitude, but also reacting to analogous problem they had with Deleuze. Resisting this turn to the Hotel of Infinite Accommodation (David Hilbert) is Catherine Malibu.
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