User:Asimong/Test

table work

Done: William Irwin Thompson on the Four Cultural Ecologies of the West

To do: Productive Democracy

For Theory of Thought-Shapers

Philosophical &/or Moral or Sociopolitical Doctrine	Structural metaphor/analogy	Conceptual problems
Epistemic foundationalism, and the levels picture of the cosmos	‘like a pyramid, there must be secure foundations for knowledge, and the cosmos must bottom out in fundamentally physical facts and entities’	Non-normative primitive facts cannot normatively support (i.e., justify) beliefs. This picture gives also rise to the ‘layers’ picture of nature: but if it’s true, then (i) it’s impossible to explain why all the higher layers don’t metaphysically and/or ontologically collapse into the bottom layer (strict type-type reduction), but (ii) if all the higher layers don’t collapse downwards, then none of them has any efficacious causal powers of its own (epiphenomenalism).
Epistemic coherentism	‘like a spider’s web, the web of belief is self-justifying’	Compatibility-relations and inferential networks of beliefs on their own do not guarantee correspondence with actual-world facts beyond beliefs.
Internalism about justification	‘justification is inside the head’	The relationship, if any, between inner content facts and the external world is essentially mysterious, and it’s fully open to radical skepticism about how inner content-facts are verified in the absence of any intersubjective evidence.
Externalism about justification	‘justification is outside the head’	The relationship between outer content facts and conscious minds, if any, is essentially mysterious, and it’s fully open to radical skepticism about how outer content-facts are verified in the absence of any conscious evidence.
Ontological dualism	‘like forking paths, fundamentally physical facts and fundamentally mental facts are mutually exclusive’	Causal relations between the fundamentally mental things or properties and the fundamentally physical things or properties are then essentially mysterious: it’s metaphysically possible for all the facts about fundamentally physical things or properties to exist or stay the same, while all the facts about fundamentally mental things or properties either fail to exist or completely change.
Hobbesian pessimism	‘like beasts or decision-theoretic robots, without coercive authoritarian governments/laws to stop us, we’ll naturally regress to the state of nature and total war’	Treating people as egoistic and mutually antagonistic beasts or biological machines operating according to decision-theoretic algorithms, actually operates as a nocebo priming people, in society, to choose and act collectively in essentially worse ways.
Rousseauian optimism	‘like noble savages, if people are left alone and free, then they’ll flourish’	Treating people as essentially free, virtuous, and happy as individuals in the state of nature, yet also essentially enslaved, corrupted, and made unhappy by society, actually operates as a nocebo priming people, in society, to choose and act collectively in essentially worse ways.
Leibnizian theological optimism	‘like a fairy tale, all is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds, because it’s created by an omnipotent, omnsicient, and omnibenevolent God’	Since natural evil and moral evil do actually exist, then either (i) God could not have prevented this evil (hence God is not omnipotent), or (ii) God could not have foreseen this evil (hence God is not omniscient), or (iii) God either created or foresaw this evil and therefore is Himself evil (hence God is not omnibenevolent): so, given the fact of evil, theological optimism is self-refuting.
Schopenhauerian existential pessimism	‘like someone carrying an immense burden, human existence is a vale of tears, therefore it’s meaningless’	A universal human condition of suffering and unhappiness, even if it were true, would still be meaningful, otherwise we wouldn’t care about our suffering and our unhappiness and prefer the opposite: so existential pessimism is self-refuting.
Reductive physicalism	‘like a tinker-toy model, everything is reducible to fundamentally physical, contingent facts’	If everything is reducible to fundamentally physical, contingent facts, then since the reducibility relation is logical strong supervenience, 79 but logical strong supervenience is itself a non-contingent, non-physical strong modal relation, therefore reductive materialism/physicalism is self-refuting.
Post-modern relativism	‘like a magnifying glass focused at a single point, all truth is relative, and no truth is universal’	If all truth is relative, and no truth is universal, then it cannot be universally true that all truth is relative and no truth is universal: so post-modern relativism is self-refuting.

79 For explicit definitions of strong supervience, natural or nomological strong supervenience, and logical strong supervenience, see section 6 below.