A summary of trickle down economic theory:

[Berzerker]

Kid -

Strange perception.

Strange rebuttal

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Kidicious

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor."
-Adam Smith

You got bills.

Well, both government and wealth predated ol' Adam. Wealth in it's earliest form was simply physical control of useful stuff. And if I was handier with spear or club or other lethal tool of choice than you were, what was mine remained mine, and what was yours became mine, and you became remains, no government needed.

If you study a little history of labor law in the US, it's pretty clear that government has evolved to more commonly protect the interests of the non-rich. i.e. we have things like child labor laws, minimum wage laws, the right to organize labor, securities laws, banking and insurance regulation, etc.

Oh, and note that little bit about "so far as it is instituted for the security of property" - that has been for a long time a relatively minor function of government.

[BeBMan]

Ok, I admit I didn´t read the whole thread, but I don´t understand this....

That has nothing to do with it. My argument is that human beings are physical creatures. It has nothing to do with determinism per se, and everything to do with physicalism. There may be indeterminacy in the physical world but that doesn't matter a jot because indeterminacy isn't sufficient to ground free will. If it was, then my actions would be just as surprising to me as they would to anyone else. As it stands they aren't - they are in accordance with my beliefs and desires.

Well, as I understand it it, you say there´s no free will, because we humans exist within a world of physical law, and those brain states are a kind of a physical process we could describe exactly if we only knew more about the brain?

But why are then my actions always in accordance with my beliefs and desires? How can I learn something then, adopt new beliefs, or change previous beliefs?

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
If you study a little history of labor law in the US, it's pretty clear that government has evolved to more commonly protect the interests of the non-rich. i.e. we have things like child labor laws, minimum wage laws, the right to organize labor, securities laws, banking and insurance regulation, etc.

These are our policies. Hands off. Seriously, that's what I'm talking about. More laws in favor of the working people to make things less unfair.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Actually, those are everyone's laws. I'm a fairly hardcore rightwinger on tax and economic policy, but much closer to left-center on regulatory policies.

"More laws" - like what, though? Most labor laws are fairly balanced as is, because you have to weigh the "benefit" with the alternative of the employer going out of business or relocating, either physically or virtually. You also have to balance increased costs of regulation being passed on to consumers across the board and/or reducing profit (and taxation) levels.

Personally, I think Enron, Andersen, WorldCom, etc. execs should swing from the nearest oak tree, and support much tighter regulation and stricter penalties for market manipulation, fraud, etc.

General labor and consumer law? Not much I can see there, although real* tort reform in consumer products liability etc. would be nice.

* not to be confused with the Republican brand, which is mostly just limiting damages no matter how unreasonable a defendant's action might be.

[HershOstropoler]

Originally posted by Agathon

The philosophers pilloried in that book are from the Continental tradition which has little or nothing to do with the Analytic tradition, which is the main thread of philosophy in English speaking countries. Eliminative materialism is largely detested by the Continentals.

Or just not known. What is "Eliminative materialism" ?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by HershOstropoler


Or just not known. What is "Eliminative materialism" ?

Don't tell him Agathon, he just wants to detest it!

[HershOstropoler]

Sssshhhhh!

[BeBMan]

Is it this?

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/MindDict/eliminativism.html

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by BeBro
Is it this?

http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~philos/...inativism.html

Yep. Impressive, ain't it?

[Sikander]

I assume that philosophers are deliberately obtuse simply to keep intelligent people from finding out what they do and forcing them to provide something of value instead, or get off the dole at least. Did anyone here actually read that? It was designed expressly to not be read, there can be no other explanation.

[Kidlicious]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Actually, those are everyone's laws. I'm a fairly hardcore rightwinger on tax and economic policy, but much closer to left-center on regulatory policies.

So at what point was the minimum wage raised that you became a conservative? BS MtG. The left has fought hard for these laws and you are not on the left. Don't take credit for them.

More Laws? Well that depends on what would be fair isn't it. I have convinced you that raw capitalism is a benefit to the rich and a cost to the poor. So, you tell me why you think the poor should have to pay any taxes at all.

[Imran Siddiqui]

So at what point was the minimum wage raised that you became a conservative? BS MtG. The left has fought hard for these laws and you are not on the left. Don't take credit for them.

And you wonder why people think lefties are arrogant ******?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by Kidicious


So at what point was the minimum wage raised that you became a conservative? BS MtG. The left has fought hard for these laws and you are not on the left. Don't take credit for them.

God, get off your high horse before you get dizzy and fall off from too little oxygen. Did I say I passed the ****ing laws, nimrod? In case you didn't bother reading the thread, I put in my ****ing time in no-benefit, minimum wage jobs. No, I'm not on the left, because once I actually looked at the way the world works, I got some brains, unlike the Barbara Boxer crowd, about how economics work, about how regulatory policies work, about how capital markets work, etc. The left has pretty much gotten itself repudiated nationwide, because of a combination of whiny rhetoric of entitlement and an utter failure to deliver the goods.

More Laws? Well that depends on what would be fair isn't it. I have convinced you that raw capitalism is a benefit to the rich and a cost to the poor. So, you tell me why you think the poor should have to pay any taxes at all.

You haven't convinced me of anything. "Raw capitalism" hasn't been practiced in the US in at least 70 years. You're the one who insisted on this monolithic "the poor" and "the rich" without definition, and with nothing in between. Sales taxes are local policy, and frankly, it would be ridiculous to have to wait around at every friggin' cash register you go to, while a bunch of people dicker around over whether they've got a tax exemption this month or not. You buy stuff that's subject to sales tax, you pay it, period. According to you, FICA is the lowest cost, best benefit insurance possible, so if somebody wants their government funded pension fund, they can pay for it. It's not a tax, it's social insurance. State and Federal income taxes have fairly substantial basic exemptions and dependent exemptions, and are heavily progressive, so depending on your definition of "the poor^TM" they may pay little or no income taxes. They do consume the majority of direct benefit government services, so as long as they're receiving more than they're paying for, their net cost is zero on average.

Back to minimum wage - do you think there would be a benefit, or not, to raising the minimum wage to, say, $15.00 an hour?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat

In other words, the typical philosophobabble of "my school of thought is right, yours is bunk." Nice job if you can get it, but other being a professor of philosophy, what use is the entire field?

And I think Sokal has equal contempt for most philosophy as self-indulgent pseudo-intellectual posturing.

And here again you show your ignorance of the book. From Sokal's book (p.5.):

"We are not attacking philosophy, the humanities or the social sciences in general, on the contrary we feel these fields are of utmost importance"

Poor showing Michael. I'm afraid your head is bigger than your brain. There are other quotations I could have used, but that's enough to expose your fraudulent comments.

Weather is an inanimate set of physical processes, although it is subject in some degree to complex systems behavior. As such, it is entirely incomparable to human thought processes.

I might as well show up this crap for what it is. Even if human thought processes can't be captured in a deterministic framework, it still doesn't prove that determinism is false, nor does it prove that we have free will. The reason is simple, either these processes supervene on brain states or they are just brain states under a different descriptive framework (like propositional attitudes). Since brain states are physical states and are covered by physical laws, so are the states that supervene on them (albeit indirectly) or states that are identical with them.

That's about as far as your sort of argument gets. I've heard it many times before. Again, this just shows that you don't know what you are talking about.

I understand philosophy enough to know that it's essentially pretentious bunk.

No, you have shown in this thread that you don't understand philosophy at all. You brought up Sokal's book as a club to beat all philosophy with, in complete ignorance of the fact that the material he is criticising is for the most part from a tradition that has little credibility among English speaking philosophers - and indeed more credibility among literature majors. The fact that Sokal himself alludes to this escapes you as well.

Either learn some proper philosophy or stop making insubstantial criticisms things of which you are ignorant.

All sorts of things - cumulative perception of life experience, received information or learning, emotional states, impulsive drives of various kinds, all occuring more or less constantly, and being responded to in varying degrees at different times.

As if that is supposed to be profound. Everyone knows this. It still doesn't count as a proof of Free Will. And it suffers from the defect of being based on first person authority and we know that this is unreliable.

Oh, like the entire range of interactions between all influences - i.e. social norms and personal views of those norms, emotional state at the moment and long term, core differences in personality (try signing up Mohandas Gandhi to Amway for example ), mental disorders (sociopathy, OCD etc.), accumulated experience, all interacting in dynamic and complex ways. Not "natural law" and not "random."

Either it's determined or it isn't.

Let's see if I can dumb it down enough for you. Your concept of "consistency" will be filtered through your belief system. If you have some trivial, non-emotional issue like sorting currency from lowest denomination to highest and all facing the same way, there won't be any real disparity in any two people's view of what is or isn't consistent. If you're talking about appropriate sentencing for a murder, with a complex set of circumstances, and you're trying to be "consistent" in applying punishment, then you may well get into all sorts of arguments about whether the sentence in a particular case is consistent with treatment of other cases. Everybody will nitpick factual or legal differences, or invent rationales for the killer's action, all to create a rationale to support their views.

Of course they will, because people are logically inconsistent (they make mistakes in reasoning and hold inconsistent beliefs). Look, I'll save you further embarrassment.

Logical consistency is fundamentally related to meaning since logic is truth functional and truth is bound up with meaning (or content as it is sometimes called). For example, the proposition "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. The reason that that particular proposition corresponds to that particular fact is because it has a determinate content. The reason that "p and not-p" is necessarily false (a contradiction) is because of the content of "p". "p" wouldn't mean anything if that wasn't a contradiction.

Now it is also true that meaning is not subjective. Your thinking a word means X doesn't mean that it does. The correct meaning of X is its use in your speech community (of course you can invent your own private words - but doing so invariably invokes a public language from which you translate into your own idiolect. The fact that people lie and wilfully misunderstand others is actually based on their having a shared language which is responsible to public rules.

That's the truth. It's not very exciting or profound, but that's what we do.

Tax policy is even stickier, because nearly every financial situation is different. Again, people will propagandize "consistency" "fairness" and other subjective concepts. Nobody admits to inconsistency or unfairness, and everybody can't be right. Some of you have to be left, but it isn't your fault.

Again - people lie and commit fraud. So what?

The whole "field" of philosophy is a bunch of people who haven't done anything else of note sitting around in a pseudointellectual mental circle-jerk inventing names and labels. Three schools of "free will" with three nonsensical names, arguing arcane points around in circles?

Imagine the outrage if we said the same about scientific jargon. All this shows me is that you don't understand what goes on in contemporary analytical philosophy and have had to resort to name calling because you're getting whipped.

The "moral principle" is meaningless until applied to something. Then everyone (having done something different) claims they have done whatever the "moral principle" in question directs them to do.

You can extend this point to mathematics or the use of names like "Caesium" - read the later Wittgenstein (those who've read this book will be laughing now). If you do this you end up with a thoroughgoing scepticism. All this shows to sensible people is that this view of the way language works is false.

And, of course, this is just the sort of view that is driving Sokal nuts. Here you are, a scientist, saying exactly the sort of thing he can't stand and wrote his book to condemn, and then using him to back up your points.

And there's a difference. I'm not talking "conceptual relativism." I'm talking the way people will (by free will ) spin what they observe and how they act to claim that it is good, consistent, or what have you. To use a basic analogy, "reality" is a used car, and what I'm talking about is techniques of selling used cars, which is the essence of politics, business, getting the girl, and a good portion of human endeavor. If you want to deal with "reality" and "consistency," go to Vulcan and talk to Spock.

So you are a sophist. If you just want to get people to do what you want irrespective of morality or the truth then fine. So what if people are inconsistent for selfish reasons. It doesn't matter - they are inconsistent. And you've overstated it - people are usually quite reasonable most of the time - especially if you treat their opinions with respect and argue fairly with them.

Look at jury psychology, marketing techniques, or similar fields, where the goal is to find people's preconceptions and prejudices, and make things appear to fit in with those preconceptions, so people will do what you want them to do. I'm not saying "conceptual relativism" has any validity, I'm saying people play the game to sell themselves, or to sell others on what they want.

Sometimes they do. So what? This is just sophistry. One could say this of a scientist trying to bull his way to a grant.

I'm surprised to see you opting for this. Old Jesus was pretty hung up on the truth (bearing false witness and all that) - I think you better pray for forgiveness.

Take your good buddy George W. Bush and the war on Iraq, for example. Do you think he really knows, understands, and believes (and has from the get-go) that all his hardon for Saddam Hussein is simply cynical, contrived, falsehood? Or is it perhaps more likely that everything he has seen and heard has been filtered in accordance with his and his administration's ideology, to match "reality" as they want to believe it to be, with what they really wanted to do anyway, which was get Hussein's ass? Which do you think is more likely?

The most likely scenario is that he told lies to get what he wanted.

The "reality" of Hussein's actions is objective, but what parts of that reality are used, reinforced and presented, and what parts of that reality are discarded as inconvenient, is a totally subjective process that varies from individual to individual.

I prefer Ockham's razor. The simplest explanation is that they lied.

What else are you going to use to make a transition piece when you need to put a square peg in a round hole?

Missed the point entirely.

Nice strawman. Let's go from economic policy to rape. indeed.

If you'd understood the example you would have understood that it's an example of the way that endorsing relativism leads to a collapse in meaning and rationality (as helpfully described above).

In a policy discussion, it's claimed and perceived "consistency" "fairness" or what have you count for more than the underlying reality. Read Macchiavelli.

I've read him - he's a sophist.

What it has to do with logical consistency is that the world we deal with is more the world of filtered information and sales pitches than the "real" world of objective information.

This is exactly the sort of bad philosophy that Sokal detests. You even have a bad metaphor (filtering) to hide the fact that you don't really know what you mean.

And every side who bends the rules, says that they're the ones that are being "fair" and "consistent" and those other SOB's are the ones bending the rules. The racist believes his worldview is consistent, as does the communist, as does the entrepreneur. Therefore, most discussions of "reality" are as futile as this one, except for entertainment purposes.

Yet people manage to have reasonable discussions every day. They manage to do this because there are shared rules, which are inescapable if one is to say anything at all. We spend the majority of our time following shared rules - imagine what life would be like if we didn't.

Three competing schools of thought with fancy names debating the nature of free will, which you say is nothing but scientifically unsound religious bunk, and I say is simply nothing more than the ability to choose behavior, and these three schools of thought and their fancy names and their questions are essential to what?

Well, if you'd bothered to look them up, you would see that they are three different attempts to give an account of free will. Of course, only one of them can be right.

Well, you apparently don't know what I'm talking about, how's that?

I do - I've heard it all before.

If they're bored or curious, it's a great read. However, you're the one with the misunderstanding of my position as "relativist." Hence my analogy above about used cars vs. used car sales techniques.

Nope. I don't think so. If you think that consistency just boils down to whatever an individual thinks is consistent then you end up with relativism (consistency is relative to each individual). Since logical consistency is the core of rationality, this amounts to saying that reason is relative.

Of course you could admit that consistency is not what each individual thinks it is in which case I win this point.

Anyway, that's enough from me. I've wasted a large amount of time giving accounts of things any good first year student learns. I've got better things to do.

Never mind - you can go back to giving Kidicious a hard time (although he is to be commended for his persistence).