I’m not sure what you want me to explain, Smears.
All of it.
.
[size=50]…[/size]
.
Smears -
Firstly, the thing you always have to remember about Hume is that he’s a sneaky atheist. It’s no secret that he tried to keep that a secret, because he didn’t want to be blackballed (which he kinda was) by the academic community and die alone and lonely. Just as he was out to refute Causation and not causation, to refute First Cause and not all causes, here, he’s out to tell us that we don’t need God to keep ourselves safe from mayhem. It’s only a rudimentary version of the Social Contract, the extant versions of which Hume rejected, but a close description of how society actually operates. Here is another link between Hume and Nietzsche, by the way - both thinkers concentrated a lot of their efforts on minimal descriptions, even in social theory. Both felt that a careful description is worth more than a sloppy prescription.
Game theory can of course be used to explain how we can co-operate without a referee, or at least a referee that is present at all times. Well, God is present at all times and so is not the kind of referee that is needed. People continue to play because, overall, and in the long run, they see the benefit to it and not because the rules are written on stone tablets. This is also how Nietzsche describes Christianity - again, the minimal case - religion operates very nicely without an actual God.
So, while some Social Contract theories rely on a god, or something like it, SCT’s based on Hume, or on Lewis, would not. That is, one of the ways to compare two philosophers is to compare the ramifications of their thought in a similar scenario - SCT in this case. Lewis (and David Gauthier, who uses an ‘economics’ model as well) would be more in step with Hume than with Kant or Rousseau, or certainly with Hobbes, who was clearly insane.
The thing about game theory is that so many different people have worked on it that it has about a gazillion variants. I’m not convinced that a lot of the details matter so much because I think different descriptions actually describe different interactions - I think that many of the models I have encountered have some descriptive power but that none of them account for all the scenarios we may find important.
But game theory in general is an attempt to find ways in which society can be ordered without an arbiter per se - the rules of games are, of course, arbitrary from the point of view of a “state of nature”. But we stumble into the rules by ourselves. The co-ordination problem arises when there is no arbiter, of course. We do have stop signs and speed limits, but these come only when we know what we want to co-ordinate and how we want to enforce it. Hume thinks that we figure this out, and so does Lewis.
Despite that Hume is not renowned as a SCTist, albeit known as someone who has made solid contributions to the field, and that Lewis is not a SCT at all, extrapolating the kind of SCT that their ideas would support would show how much closer Lewis is to Hume than to other social thinkers. (This is that “see what their epistemology would support” thing that i talk about - the only thing is that Hume is the Great Anti-Epistemologist, so you have to get a little creative).
Does that help? I’m still not sure what you’re looking for.
Very helpful.
Can you help me out on what you mean by anti-epistemology from Hume?
I’m gonna take a shot in the dark and say he was against it because he saw the work so far in it as some kind of superfluous expansion of language that went in to talking about things that were…uh…metaphysical or…not worth talking about? Or something?
Well, I think he destroyed epistemology. Because that was the avenue he took to destroy metaphysics, the former being an example of the latter. But it was kind of a natural for Hume. Above all, he wanted to be taken seriously, to be recognized as the genius that he was. At the time, it was still very much de rigueur to “begin” with epistemology - to ground your thinking with an original epistemic theory. He was original, all right. But you couldn’t skip over epistemology in those days, the way Nietzsche did later (if he hadn’t, he might even have had some readers while he was still alive and lucid). Hume went for the whole enchilada.
Hume also wanted to destroy Rationalism, which had, by his time, become thoroughly Christianized. But so had science. The scientific method was well entrenched, but with it came with all those nasty Enlightenment Era metaphysical trappings. The clockwork with the clockmaker, and all that. It was believed then, as it is widely believed on ILP, that there is some metaphysics to science. Hume wasn’t having it. Epistemology is the nexus between science and metaphysics - or it was until Hume, anyway.
He was conscious of language - another link between him and Nietzsche (I can’t help it). But he was most conscious of the fictions that pervade philosophies (and sciences) that purports to deal with reality. Thus his obsession with causation, for instance.
If what you’re saying is that we can get rid of all non-physical stuff, except our descriptions of physical stuff in as much as they aren’t physical themselves, then I think I agree.
But when you say, “destroyed epistemology”, I feel like I want to hear instead, that he “forced epistemologists into a new paradigm”. Could that be true? I mean, could there not be an epistemology that would support your view and only yours?
I’ve seen Nietzsche being accused of having an epistemology. I’ve been accused of it myself.
Let me put it this way - it used to be that philosophy set the epistemic paradigm for science. Perhaps it could be said that science sets the epistemic paradigm for philosophy. Perhaps a more precise (and less dramatic) way to say it is that Hume removed epistemology from philosophy - although Kant never got the memo.
I mean, we can continually ask “What is knowledge?” But we could use that free time for drugs and hookers.
You decide.
Eureka… I just figured out why you don’t seem to know what you’re talking about here…
It’s because it has ceased to be important to you to ask about how you know what you think you know (i.e., epistemology).
Eureka.
Still assuming causation?
Still assuming he had a cause?
Huh?
.
[size=50]…[/size]
.
.
[size=50]…[/size]
.
Even if it is mere correlation, I think there is a Eureka.
Certainly, without an epistemology, one can express what one believes, even make guesses as to why one believes things - not as arguments in favor of said processes as the right epistemology, but just, well sort of like a diary.
But you can’t dismiss other people’s arguments without an epistemology. Or let’s add, and be consistent. One retains the ability of course. Dismissal by labeling the status of the other person’s argument. Oh, that is metaphysics. Oh, that is silly.
You could note a feeling of revulsion. And it should be expressed this way.
Oh, I don’t like that. And yes, also. Oh, I don’t believe that. Both likely to be true, according to my epistemology, or hell, intuition.
But to label the category of the other person’s argument/belief without an epistemology is projecting a description of one’s emotions onto the objects of the world. IOW metaphysics in the pejorative sense.
Unless you are a solipsist. Because then your own tastes ARE the world. You aren’t even being rude in that situation.
Hear, hear…
Is this your way of telling me that you want me to find Lewis papers on his social and political philosophies?
Sure.
So, I haven’t read Faust’s response. I once was driving him crazy about the golden rule and now I find myself being driven that direction on this topic. So it’s better I just get stuff indirectly through other posters. However I can make some deductions, in general, about the post I haven’t read, given his beliefs.
Without a belief in causation or epistemology any response to one of my posts is actually a description of what happened as and after he read it. Since this may have been experienced, phenomenologically (pardon the redundance), as things that relate to my post, his response may be in object terms. Labeling my post, labeling the argument, seeming to argue against it or how it is argued, perhaps as has happened before describing me or my mind. This would of course not be meant to be taken literally, despite the object speak. To take it literally would mean it implied (or posited) causation and epistemological beliefs.
His post simply an account of what happened after reading my post. Or what seemed to happen at what seemed to be that time. Or what seemed to seem to happen…etc.
Or perhaps it merely did happen after and there was no phenomenlogical experience of connection.
Good philosophy is all about descriptivism g.