Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

And then there's quantum mechanics.

Of course, the meaning of the word 'fact' is a social construct, so there's nothing wrong with defining it as describing 'phenomenon that we perceive'. However, it's anthropocentric to define facts only through human perception, and there's also the fact of the matter that we aren't just 'observing' the world, we are in the world, of the world, and as quantum mechanics tells us, our observations impact the world. And we don't simply observe the world, we use the world itself to observe it. 'Facts' are created not just through social relations, but are instead constantly recreated through complex intrarelations of subject, apparatus and object.

The best book I've read on this question is Karen Barad's Meeting the Universe Halfway. At the end of that book, she defines 'understanding' as reacting to a difference. In that way, the plants 'understands' the shadows when they refuse to grow in them. Uhm, and so on. I should reread it soon, I think.

The whole thing shows the bankruptcy of cartesian dualism, iirc.

These are all nice points, but "Is it a fact if you can prove it but I can't?" is just like bad high school stoner sophistry AFAICT.

Prove that Tool rocks. Show your work.

i agree
w frederik b
basically

my wittgenstein is from freshman year and probably appropriately shallow, but doesn't he talk in on certainty about people's attitude towards their "bedrock" beliefs, beliefs they cannot sanely doubt (not just moral precepts like no-killing but the kind of empirical observations descartes claims to doubt--there is a floor beneath my feet, there is no demon in my head, my senses are reporting on a real world that also exists for others etc)? says iirc that these beliefs vary from person to person and culture to culture and cannot be meaningfully rated against each other BUT ALSO that it would be absurd to act as if your personal set of them were not reliable--that you should act in accordance with what you perceive to be fundamental truths, while remembering that you have no way of knowing if they are. seems to me that this is the complicated way in which mature 20/21c-ers are obligated to live, and also that lots of people do live this way--they act from conviction without necessarily being sure the universe is with them. (that this is "rationally" "impossible" proves nothing but the limits of rationality in understanding human behavior+ability.) the nyt article seems to think that the only alternative to belief in the objective truth of your moral system is helpless stasis: that if you teach kids they could be wrong about things that seem clear to them, or that circumstances might transform apparent Goodness into Badness, they will be paralyzed for life. those ideas certainly do make moral decision-making trickier and less comfortable! but that's because moral decision-making is tricky and uncomfortable (especially after the scorecard racked up by its most confident practitioners), not because lacan or derrida or the simpsons or your snarky teenage son made it that way. people have been wishing this difficulty away forever and they have always blamed its most recent set of messengers for creating it, and always in the same way: they corrupt the youth. prepare the hemlock.

speaking of the youth tho, i am relieved to read that recent reports about their terrifying dogmatism and militantly illiberal disrespect for white men's opinions have been exaggerated, that the kids are still a bunch of amoral blank-faced slackers with no convictions, and that liberalism is still going Too Far after all. maybe we can bring pogs and tech decks back too.

(extremely insecure in this company abt the wittgenstein part of that post but it gets better halfway thru prob)

you should act in accordance with what you perceive to be fundamental truths, while remembering that you have no way of knowing if they are

isn't this Kant's categorical imperative, basically?

Pop culture is getting less and less moral. As it gets more and more self-referential it spends less time commenting on the Real World. Like a copy of a copy, it takes the appearance of something that has genuine value, while being nothing more than a hollow money-making scheme.

Me: “I believe that George Washington was the first president. Is that a fact or an opinion?”

Him: “It’s a fact.”

Me: “But I believe it, and you said that what someone believes is an opinion.”

Him: “Yeah, but it’s true.”

Me: “So it’s both a fact and an opinion?”

The blank stare on his face said it all "I can't believe my dad is this stupid".

fixed

george washington wasnt president until galileo spotted him

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/db4EFh1dQFM/hqdefault.jpg

"Pop culture is getting less and less moral. As it gets more and more self-referential it spends less time commenting on the Real World. Like a copy of a copy, it takes the appearance of something that has genuine value, while being nothing more than a hollow money-making scheme."

I think it's a little dubious to suggest that moral relativism and moral nihilism are popular among American college students in large part because of a half-baked fact/opinion distinction some of them may have been taught in grade school. And other aspects of it are sort of clumsy. But some of the criticisms the piece is getting in this thread seem like they're being leveled with undue emphasis against fairly innocuous claims.

About the fact/opinion thing, I think his main points were just that (a) whether something is a fact does not depend on whether someone has proved it or could prove it, (b) not everything someone believes counts as an opinion, (c) suggesting otherwise invites confusion, and (d) suggesting that something is either a fact or an opinion and never the twain shall meet definitely invites confusion.

If I had to guess what the author thinks a fact is, I'd guess he thinks a fact is just another word for a truth, and things can be true independently of whether anyone believes or knows them. (Which is all consistent with saying that what we can determine to be a fact is constrained by our limitations, that whether something gets called or treated as a fact depends on all kinds of things about society, and that this is a matter of significance because concepts like "fact" and "truth" have rhetorical power.)

There's plenty of room to disagree with all that, of course, but it's not stupid.

Dude explicitly says facts and truth are not the same thing tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iC9xpDSXyI

Reads like yet another What's Wrong With Kids These Days essay to me. In this case, what's wrong is Those Fuzzy Thinking Public School Teachers, who comprise yet another highly convenient and popular whipping boy for all the Right Thinking Citizens Everywhere.

lol alfred

meme potential, that

He left a note. He left a simple little note that said "I've gone out the window." This is a major intellectual and he leaves a note that says "I've gone out the window." He's a role-model. You'd think he'd leave a decent note.

tragedy plus time

Dude explicitly says facts and truth are not the same thing tho
― Οὖτις, Tuesday, March 3, 2015 8:13 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I went looking for this and didn't find it

(a) whether something is a fact does not depend on whether someone has proved it or could prove it, (b) not everything someone believes counts as an opinion, (c) suggesting otherwise invites confusion, and (d) suggesting that something is either a fact or an opinion and never the twain shall meet definitely invites confusion.

Point (a) is absurd, though. I expect we would all agree that physical reality exists independent of our perception of it. "Facts", on the other hand, only exist in human minds. While the precise mechanisms of gravitation remain unknown to us, I hope we don't imagine that there are a bunch of uncaught, gravity-related facts floating around like butterflies in the aether waiting for a human mind to snare them. No such things exist. Instead, there is simply the undifferentiated reality of the physical universe, energy and matter, waves and particles. As we figure things out about that reality, we construct "facts" as a means of codifying and communicating what we've learned.

To call a statement a "fact" is to make the claim that it is true in a universal, provable sense that should not be disputed. It is a fact, for instance, that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water. The quality of fact-ness is also often granted to other, less clearly provable but still generally accepted propositions: descriptions of shared perception ("the sky is blue"), matters of historical record, "known knowns" of every sort. It's even extended to supposed moral consensus, but that's the point at which the analogy collapses. Absent religion, there is no universal "external reality" to which moral arguments can be compared. We might reasonably say, "it is a fact that theft is a crime," but we'd be on much shakier ground arguing, "it is a fact that theft is wrong."

This is why (b) is also absurd. Of course one can "believe" or "feel" that a factual statement is true in just the same sense that one can believe or feel the same about a non-factual statement. It is not a difference in the quality of belief or feeling that causes us to distinguish between facts and opinions, however, but a difference in degree of factuality. I might believe, for instance, that the Illuminati control the media. I might also believe that hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form water. Both of these things could reasonably be described as my opinions, but only one is based in fact. Therefore, it makes practical sense to distinguish between "facts" (where the evidence is clear and opinion is therefore irrelevant) and "opinions" (where facts are unavailable, contradictory or unconvincing).

if it BENDS

I hope we don't imagine that there are a bunch of uncaught, gravity-related facts floating around like butterflies in the aether waiting for a human mind to snare them.

That would be a pretty weird thing to think, which should be a clue that it may not be the best interpretation of the view I was suggesting.

All that (a) in my last post says is that something can be fact even if no one can prove it. That alone doesn't commit you to the view that facts or truths are extra bits of reality over and above true statements or the things referred to in true statements. Later in my last post I suggested the author of that piece might think that something can be a fact which even if no one knows or believes it, which is admittedly stronger than what (a) says. But I don't think that commits you to belief in mind-independent facts either.

Plus I think someone holding the general sort of view I'm talking about could accommodate your observations about how the term "fact" is often used. They could say this: A lot of times when people say something is a fact, as opposed to just asserting that thing (e.g. "vaccines are safe" vs. "it's a fact that vaccines are safe"), they do it for emphasis. So the word "fact" (like the words "truth" and "true") often serves the purpose of communicating extra confidence and authority. People tend to use it this way when they think they can back up what they say. People are less apt to do this about moral claims because they're often less confident about their ability to back up moral claims if challenged. But that just reflects the connotation of the word in some contexts, not its meaning.

I'm confused by your last paragraph. You start by saying it's absurd to suggest that an opinion is not the same thing as a belief. But by the end, you've offered what to me looks like a plausible distinction between factual beliefs and opinions. What's absurd about following through with that distinction and saying beliefs "where facts [in your sense] are unavailable, contradictory or unconvincing" are just what opinions are, and that since not all beliefs fit that description, not all beliefs are opinions?

(Actually, looking back on the article, I think the author might take your side on the question of what opinions are. But I think someone could non-absurdly disagree.)

Just to be clear, I'm not saying your views are the absurd ones. I don't think either of these positions are absurd.

I was offering that third-paragraph equivocation (allowing that beliefs supported by facts are not distinct in the quality of belief itself from beliefs not so supported) as a sop to the author. He treats this point as a major blow to the curriculum's fact/opinion distinction. It's not. It's a pedantic technical quibble that evades the substance of the distinction. We believe that verifiable facts are true just as we believe the same of the unsupported opinions we hold dear. Few would argue there. Again, the difference is that the former are provable while the latter are not.

Of course, in the real world and in adult thinking, the line between the two is often blurry. But this is second grade pedagogy, right? There's every reason to present the distinction as clear and simple, something that can be grasped and applied by young minds. As the student's understanding develops, the gray areas and implications can be explored. And I view the distinction being made here as absolutely essential to the development of critical thinking skills.

I agree with McBrayer that we tend "waffle" on the words and concepts related to this debate: fact, truth, proof, opinion, belief, knowledge, etc. This causes problems and confusion, but I feel that he's being deliberately obtuse in attempting to obscure the useful, grade-school-appropriate distinction between opinion and fact. He's being obtuse, no offense, in the manner of religiously-motivated thinkers who are being evasive about the religious foundations of their thinking. Religion often insists that moral statements have the quality of absolute, objective truth, something very much like scientific factuality (and McBrayer uses this language: "objective moral facts"). Absent religion or quasi-religious ideology, however, it is very hard to support such an idea.

Also, I believe, frankly, that McBrayer's crypto-religious insistence on the existence of "objective moral facts" has absolutely NO place in the public school curriculum at any grade level. It is perfectly appropriate to teach values, but not to pretend that those values have the same quality of objective factuality as the things studied in, say, a science classroom.

Perhaps it does moral values a disservice to treat them simply as "matters of opinion" (I would certainly expect a religiously-motivated philosopher to say so), but again, where a public school curriculum designed for young children is concerned, I would rather the curriculum err on the side of value-neutral discretion. The foundations of a child's moral belief system are better established by parents than schools, imo.

kill u all

dorks r us, what u want?

on a related matter, I've been listening to the new NYT Magazine Ethicist podcast and everyone involved (the letter writers and the ethicicts) are monsters

A lot of the letters to the old Ethicist column struck me as what I'd retroactively term humblebrags.

I went looking for this and didn't find it

sorry JRN, I was thinking of this passage: It’s a mistake to confuse truth (a feature of the world) with proof (a feature of our mental lives). Furthermore, if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative.

last sentence is utter garbage

One thing that's going on here is a clash of intuition/experience about how the word "fact" is used. Sometimes I use it in reference to things that no one is a position to prove, it seems natural to me, and no one objects. Other people do this too. I guess that's less true in your experience.

Another thing I've been reluctant to go into is what "prove" means in this context. Very few things can be proven in the strict sense, and the less strict you want to be about proof, the blurrier status of fact becomes on your view, the more satisfying a rhetorical-force-not-meaning explanation of the connection between fact and "proof" becomes.

I think you could come up with a plausible fact/opinion distinction suitable for second-graders that would please McBrayer really easily. You could say facts are things that are true, and opinions are beliefs that we can't prove (we can agree that second graders don't need to get into the vagaries of what exactly "prove" means). Then you could give examples that would track the common sense distinction without asking the kids to classify moral claims as opinions (and opinions as non-facts). That would do the trick.

I don't see McBrayer suggesting that children should be taught that moral facts are just like scientific facts. It seems to me like he's saying (1) that kids shouldn't be taught that moral beliefs belong to the realm of opinion where opinion is thought of as strictly distinct from fact and (2) the latter approach is especially confusing when the same institution is trying to inculcate certain moral values in its students.

In other words, it's not that thoroughgoing moral realism should be part of the grade school curriculum, but rather that a confusing distinction that biases kids against that kind of realism shouldn't be a part of the grade school curriculum.

It hadn't actually occurred to me that McBrayer might be a religiously-motivated philosopher when I first read this. Looking at his website now, it seems that's probably true. But there are plenty of atheist moral realist philosophers, and I encounter those more often than the religious kind. That might explain why I didn't have the allergic reaction to the article that some others did. Moral realism is a hard sort of view to defend, but then I think every view is hard to defend.

I'm not gonna get into this but Οὖτις, whether "proof is required for facts" is a pretty widely-debated philosophical point; I guess "garbage" is just ILX hyperbole but at any rate it's not obviously wrongheaded to think that something can be true but could never be proved (by an agent of our cognitive type at least; let's leave gods out of this). A classic example is whatever is happening on the other side of a black hole: we can never verify it one way or the other, so does that mean that there's no fact of the matter of what's happening over there?

ah fuck why I am getting into this

lollllll

xxp I agree that "if proof is required for facts, then facts become person-relative" is a bad inference. But the first part of that passage distinguishes truth from proof, not truth from fact.

What is this thread about exactly?

creeps

http://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/past-debates/item/1310-liberals-are-stifling-intellectual-diversity-on-campus

the terrific Sarah Jaffe:

Being offended is not in itself political. “What is political,” Cross writes, is the way that racist ideas contribute to systemic violence, the way transphobic language acts as “the spearpoint of violence against trans women, used to justify it and all but ensure such crimes will be repeated.” We are not talking about offense. We are talking about actual harm and lost life.

As Sara Ahmed points out, making arguments turn on hurt feelings is an excellent way to cover up the actual mechanisms of power at work.

hat we've seen too often lately is the feelings of one or a small group of people being substituted for an actual understanding of harm and of power. And the people whose feelings get aired in public and taken seriously are often those who already have a level of power to begin with.

For women in particular, the ways we have been limited in public discourse and action have shaped the very writing and actions we take to challenge sexist structures. As Mary Beard noted in The London Review of Books, women historically were allowed to speak publicly on two subjects: “First … as victims and as martyrs—usually to preface their own death,” and “second … women could legitimately rise up to speak—to defend their homes, their children, their husbands or the interests of other women.”

We can either detail our own victimhood, or we can speak about the victimhood of other women. (It is unfortunate that Beard, who makes this point so well, signed on to a letter in The Guardian which itself is an excellent example of feelings-as-politics.)

We see this in what Phoebe Maltz Bovy calls “feelings journalism”: writers “making an argument based on what they imagine someone else is thinking, what they feel may be another person’s feelings.” The offspring of the personal essay, feelings journalism substitutes reporting on facts, systems, even asking people about their situation, with an emotional appeal. It takes up the victimhood of others, without even asking them if they consider themselves victims.

As Maltz Bovy notes, feelings journalism arose from economic constraints on the media industry; budget cutbacks and the accelerated 24-hour news cycle online lead to a demand for content that simply can't be filled by costly reporting. It is itself a structural issue. The feelings evoked by such pieces drive the clicks that pay the bills, and the writers themselves are usually underpaid (or unpaid).

Whatever the cause, though, the result has been an individualizing of political issues, a narrowing of our understanding. As I wrote in For Love or Money, a chapbook I co-authored with Melissa Gira Grant, “When we center our own feelings about something that’s happening to someone else, we lose all potential for solidarity.”

What we end up with instead is a politics of pity and charity; endless articles in newspapers and magazines about the abject misery of the poor and handwringing about what “we” should do about it. Gira Grant argues in For Love or Money that tears become a substitute for the hard work of political organizing. “Weeping, from a safe distance. Weeping that somehow isn’t also read as a form of objectification.”

As for the people who are the objects of all this feeling, well, their voices continue to simply be wiped out of the conversation. Sydette Harry brings up the example of Janay Rice, whose wishes after the video of her then-fiancé assaulting her made news were continually ignored. The NFL, which employs Rice’s now-husband, hired “domestic violence advisers” but, Harry writes, “This major step to ‘address issues’ still hinges on making a Black woman’s personal affairs heartbreakingly public and assuring that no one who represents her voice—which has asked for very different things than advocacy—will be heard.”

http://www.damemagazine.com/2015/03/02/are-we-mistaking-feelings-politics

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/03/10/no-a-public-university-may-not-expel-students-for-racist-speech/

on the expelled oklahoma frat students

is expulsion a first amendment issue? huh.

public university = state funding

yeah idk surely there's room for rules of comportment in any such institution that needn't be held to constutional level challenge?

YU had a big controversy a few years ago about allowing an LGBT club on campus. They didn't want to but were federally mandated bc they received fed money. They are otherwise a private institution so much more w a state university

Last sentences of WAPO article show that argument hinges on just-because-U-receives-public-funding,-it's-an-arm-of-the-government. Argument is nonsense.

You could also interpret the speech as a violation of the student conduct code of OU, which I actually looked up today bc I am ridiculous

http://www.ou.edu/content/dam/studentlife/documents/AllCampusStudentCode.pdf

yeah i think the state funding thing is kind of far reaching to be used in WAPO 'expert's context.

xp why nonsense? i've personally seen it come up in other cases and was seemingly accepted. (nb it could be that the threat of the fed withdrawing funding was so severe that the universities complied even tho it might not have stood up in court)

You unlicensed lawyers should really read the link he provided with the case citations:
http://www.volokh.com/posts/1172536284.shtml

If it's "nonsense" then SCOTUS and its children have been on some nonsense for 30+ years

Volokh is a dick but he is in fact an expert