RE: What makes people irrational thinkers?
January 4, 2022 at 10:51 pm
(This post was last modified: January 4, 2022 at 11:00 pm by Neo-Scholastic.)
@Simon Moon, what I question is whether meeting a “burden of proof” is a useful epistemic obligation for a couple of reasons.
First, I agree with @Belacqua; it’s more of a debate tactic than tool of serious inquiry. If the goal is, as you wrote, to “separate fact from fiction” then reliving critics of a proposition from any obligation to defend their opposition to it. If the goal is to increase understanding, allowing "one side" to be a default position is literally half as effective.
Second, appeal to a “burden of proof” often hides an undisclosed foundationist standard. On AF that means that any theistic proposition must trace back to some foundational principle that is either incorrigible, unmediated or indispensable. At the same time, any theistic proposition is opposed with arguments based on Pyrrhonic skepticism...even though Pyrrhonic skepticism and foundationalism are mutually exclusive.
Now, I will say that warrant is a more lenient standard than justification. However, I only say that because I am not entirely certain that justification is the best most reliable standard for all types of beliefs about all kinds of things. For example, people have different unmediated experiences. While most are common and trivial, on rare occasions some people do have numinous experience that are realer-than-real. As someone who has had enough such mystical experiences that I cannot deny them, I still recognize that they are properly basic to me alone. Justification is a very tough standard for any philosophical stance to meet and very few do. @polymath257 hasn't proven either his nominalism or radical empiricism but expects everyone else to take it for granted.
Finally, I would prefer not to think of atheism and theism as opposing “sides”. Maybe each is working a different side of the same problem.
First, I agree with @Belacqua; it’s more of a debate tactic than tool of serious inquiry. If the goal is, as you wrote, to “separate fact from fiction” then reliving critics of a proposition from any obligation to defend their opposition to it. If the goal is to increase understanding, allowing "one side" to be a default position is literally half as effective.
Second, appeal to a “burden of proof” often hides an undisclosed foundationist standard. On AF that means that any theistic proposition must trace back to some foundational principle that is either incorrigible, unmediated or indispensable. At the same time, any theistic proposition is opposed with arguments based on Pyrrhonic skepticism...even though Pyrrhonic skepticism and foundationalism are mutually exclusive.
Now, I will say that warrant is a more lenient standard than justification. However, I only say that because I am not entirely certain that justification is the best most reliable standard for all types of beliefs about all kinds of things. For example, people have different unmediated experiences. While most are common and trivial, on rare occasions some people do have numinous experience that are realer-than-real. As someone who has had enough such mystical experiences that I cannot deny them, I still recognize that they are properly basic to me alone. Justification is a very tough standard for any philosophical stance to meet and very few do. @polymath257 hasn't proven either his nominalism or radical empiricism but expects everyone else to take it for granted.
Finally, I would prefer not to think of atheism and theism as opposing “sides”. Maybe each is working a different side of the same problem.
<insert profound quote here>
