Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

On Sunday, I said something about Stefan Molyneux's new book. He purports to discuss the art of argument, and runs through certain basics about logic but ... punts on the Peircean principle of abduction. I'll address Stefan directly hereafter. The rest of you may listen in. --------------------------- This is how you define abduction: "There is another category [of inference] called abductive reasoning that draws a tentative hypothesis from disparate data, but which is related to some sort of testable hypothesis, rather than the reaching of a specific conclusion." Um ... no. You seem to have simply thrown together some words here without thinking about why or whether they even make any sense together. An abduction won't get you to a certain or dogmatic conclusion, but it doesn't follow that the conclusion must fail to be "specific." Also, what does it mean for data to be "disparate," why would the data on which an abduction be bas...

Stefan Molyneux has gone all Trumpet on us. I've written about Molyneux before, most recently a two-post discussion early this year, keyed to his now-decade-old book, UNIVERSALLY PREFERRED BEHAVIOR (2007) in which he claimed to have figured out what are the rules of behavior all rational beings should follow, and to have inferred from them that the right social system is anarcho-capitalism. That book wasn't a great one, frankly, and Molyneux at his best is a pale shadow of Murray Rothbard as an anarcho-cap figure. Still, he was on the good guy's side, as I keep score anyway. Molyneux, though, has progressively defected.  He is now entirely in the MAGA camp. The nation-state may never be legitimate, but it can be legitimate enough!  at least if Donald Trump is its CEO. Or ... something. The news about Molyneux is that he is out with another book, THE ART OF THE ARGUMENT (2017).  The is some copy from the amazon page: "'T he Art of the Argument' shoc...

Molyneux's most sustained effort at systematic philosophy is the book Universally Preferable Behavior (2007). Upon publication, it was the object of a memorable take-down by David Gordon, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. Here is that review: https://mises.org/library/molyneux-problem One incidental fact: Gordon's review is headlined "The Molyneux Problem," which is a sidelong reference to another Molyneux from a long time ago. It was in 1688 that an Irishman, William Molyneux, wrote to the English philosopher John Locke asking him about an issue in the psychology of perception.  He asked whether a man who has been born blind, and who has learned to distinguish between a sphere and a cube by touch, would be able to distinguish the sphere from the cube if he did gain sight in the course of his adult life, by sight alone. This is the original Molyneux Problem. Why is the historical pun relevant to the book? Gordon's view of Molyneux is ...

Stefan Molyneux seems to be the hot new thing among young anarcho-capitalists. Not old fuddy-duds like me. He is the author for example of Universally Preferable Behavior, a book that attempts to expound a rationally impregnable (and secular) ethical system. I have not read that, or anything else of Molyneux's. I leave to those who have read it to pass on its merits. I do not rely entirely upon secondary sources, though. I did spend some time listening to one of his podcasts, the beginning of a comprehensive course on philosophy he offers here .  That particular link leads you to a forty minute effort to introduce the subject matter of the remainder of a series. The gist of it, if I understand it at all, is that philosophy, in the sense in which Molyneux proposes to use the term for the duration of the course, the sort of philosophy he hopes to teach, is: a lot like empirical science -- indeed it is empirical science, writ large -- such that any inferences a ph...