I don’t know either. But that is largely my point. In trying to understand how and why we come to react [as particular individuals] to conflicting goods at the intersection of “I” and political power, our intentions and motivations become entangled in the gap between what we think we know is true here and now and what is in fact true given a frame of that actually can know this.
Here of course most folks assign that task to God. But others, in rejecting religion, assign it instead to one or another political ideology or intellectual contraption [RM/AO, Value Ontology etc.] or assessment of nature.
As for the “hole”, my argument is certainly not that your argument is less reasonable than mine. It is only an attempt to describe it here at ILP; and then to note the assumptions and the components it is based on; and then to elicit reactions. Reactions from the objectivists, reactions from the non-objectivists.
And then [from time to time] to speculate on the extent to which some folks here become rather hostile to my point of view. Entire threads are created to expose me as a fool. Why? Well, perhaps because some sense the possibility that the components of my own argument here may well be applicable to their own “I” too.
What do you think?
Or, perhaps, we should invite the “serious philosophers” here to pin down once and for all the epistemological parameters of the word “contraption”.
They could react to the manner in which I construe your own rendition of pragmatism as just another existential/intellectual contraption; and then the manner in which you insist that it is not a contraption at all.
Let’s make the attempt to take this to the either/or world: Is it or not?
Then we could invite in other members of the mammal community to weigh in on it.
And then, in my view, it’s straight back up into the stratosphere:
Indeed, the dialogue needs to focus in on a particular context. One involving conflicting goods that we are all familiar with. We can explore the actual existential, “for all practical purposes” implications of the words that we choose in our “general descriptions” above.