About

The Blog

This is a personal blog which encourages  and welcomes criticism of any of the posts that have been submitted. If criticism is levelled at any of the arguments I make and the criticism is decisive, the post will be modified or retracted. If modified a footnote will be added with information about the criticism, the person that offered the criticism and the passage that was criticized. If retracted there will be an explantion placed, while keeping the original title.

The acronym in the blog stands for Criticism, Imagination & Fallibility; these are the core values I think are necessary for a productive exchange in philosophy.

Politics

I have political views that are broadly anarchistic, but are informed somewhat by Karl Popper's notion of piece-meal social engineering. Many anarchists would not consider me an anarchist on the basis that I am critical of revolution; anarchism, it is thought, is revolutionary by definition, but I am not sold on this view. Although I do think anarchism is, at its best, a critical enterprise that puts even itself into question, but especcially authoritarian practices (and is therefore potentially revolutionary) I do not think that to be an anarchist you have to endorse revolution as the only or even the best type of political change, in fact it often turns out to be the most damaging.

Tradition is our greatest resource for navigating the world but that does not mean it is  infallible. Traditions are often over-turned, but what replaces them are new traditions, and so I do not consider traditions to be a priori in question.  A particular tradition should only be abandoned if there is a better solution to the problem that the traditional views have tried to solve.

I am anti-corporatist, but not necessarily anti-capitalist. If you want to discuss why I still consider myself anarchist, please feel free to comment on my blog or e-mail me.

Metaphysics

Objectivism and Apatheist (pragmatic agnosticism). Objectivism is the view that an external world exists and all our statements attempt to make true statements about some part of this world. Apathiest is just the view that whether god does or does not exists  has no bearing on my life. I am a metaphysical pluralist, meaning that I think that abstractions exist, the mind exists and the empirical world exists, and they all exist on the "same level"; none is more real than another. This makes the empirical world, just one among many possible types of worlds, inc the abstract world and the world of human psychology (and potentially infinite amount of other types of world), all are a manifestation, or an emergence of the fundamental laws of the particular universe in which those "worlds" are found. I am also an advocate of the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics. All physically possible worlds (with the same laws as ours) are actual, somewhere, right now.

Epistemology

Fallibilism, more particularly Critical Rationalism. It seems to be the only way to avoid Agrippa's trilemma - as detailed in Hans Albert treatise on critical reason. This is broadly where my views have not changed at the core, I have always had some type of fallibalist approach: scepticism then pragmatism then model-agnosticism and then Critical Rationalism. The reason pragmatism fails agrippa's trilemma is because a statement is seen as true if it is useful, but that only begs the question. model-agnosticism fails, because it is impossible to truly say how much confidence you should have in a theory compared to other theories; if you are merely guessing it collapses into either comprehensive scepticism or criticial rationalism, depending on your metaphysic. If you do try and quantify it, you have to come up with an argument for some justificationist view that does not fall prey to agrippa's trilemma. Scepticism is harder to talk about, because there are two kinds. The pop-science kind and the philosophical kind, the latter suffers from an a fundemental agreement with justificationist views of the world, the former because it has broadly similar views of science as that of neo-positivism (or logical empricism), which has an authoritarian view about observation which is false, because all observation is theory laden, which subverts its authority, and merely states that it is guessing about what observation is.

Ethics

I have no settled ethical view, but my meta-ethical views are realist.