#empiricism

‘There is a great arbiter of truth that is known as Real Life’ - UBC Prof. Arthur James Charbonneau

Debate in the broadest sense refers to the social processes that occur when different people express beliefs to each other that are mutually psychologically dissonant. This broad category imposes almost no constraint on what exactly occurs after the mutually dissonant beliefs have been expressed: the behaviour responses could in principle be arbitrarily varied. The category also imposes no constraint on how the myriad possible outcomes of such social processes are evaluated by witnesses of the debate’s initial instigation. These evaluations may similarly in principle be primarily concerned with arbitrarily varied analyses. As long as the thing being evaluated is a process of interpersonal interaction arising causally from expressed interpersonal disagreement, the subject of such evaluation may be described in a meaningful sense as a debate.

In the context of this generalized meaning, it is in particular a vague and poorly defined inquiry (at least in isolation) to ask which party or parties to a debate have emerged ‘victorious’. Again, in order to perform a meaningful evaluation of a debate in the present broad sense, it is first necessary to specify what outcomes are actually desirable. So before making any claims about debate ‘winners’ and/or ‘losers’, there must be some previously established criteria against which victory/defeat/success/failure are to be evaluated. To this end it is worth investigating in the first place: what specific risks do interpersonal disagreements exacerbate, that it might be nice for debates to mitigate? Essentially, disagreements can add challenges to efforts requiring practical coordination. It is difficult for example to build housing for a hundred people if only two of those hundred people are willing to participate in the construction work (obviously in many actual communities there are compelling options for seeking outside assistance with this sort of thing, but the isolated scenario still seems illustrative of the general class of social coordination challenges at many different scales of interpersonal interaction). So, debates might be made useful to the extent that they can maintain the possibility of materially productive coordination despite some degree of (at least initial) disagreement. What does this maintenance require?

Consider the ways populations of people might come to generally adopt certain beliefs. It is perhaps sufficient in some cases simply that the social rituals in play prioritize the beliefs in question over any potential epistemic competitors. For example, if King Hart strikes the town bell with the Staff of Heraldry every morning to summon the sun from its slumber, this may be adequate to support a general consensus that ethical conclusions flow primarily from King Hart’s personal assertions. But what if Queen Bart disagrees? Perhaps she starts to crack open a pearl-clutching mollusk by the town obelisk every dusk, and so strikes the flame of starlight into the heavens. Who or what is to arbitrate between contradicting decrees (about textile import tariff rates, say) from the child of the Sun and the child of the Moon? Historical accounts describe the following kinds of approaches (among others).

Everyone chooses a relevant team and works together with other volunteers for that team to kill or threaten into submission everyone participating in any other team, using violence.

This reduces the disagreement’s complication by quickly shrinking the field of active belligerents. It also has the advantage of being self-enforcing and simple for participants to understand. It is also negative-sum, however.

Flip a coin. Zero-sum, easy to verify and understand. No inherent enforcement mechanism though.

Accommodate divergence. In other words, ignore the dispute altogether if possible. Positive-sum, hard to verify, not always possible even in principle (conflict over exclusive access to a particular tree, for example, is inherently a zero-sum resource competition). Bid with favours. Positive-sum, easy to verify. Difficult to enforce and non-trivial to understand. The arbiters consulted in each of these cases are (respectively) the material circumstances of violent conflict, the material circumstances of events with hard-to-predict binary outcome possibilities, no arbiter at all, and some pre-established social agreement about individual and/or collective claims to material possessions. Note that the latter two cases risk demanding later recourse to some further arbiter: a once-ignorable conflict may become less ignorable over time, and a social agreement establishing some structure of material possession claims may itself be or become subject to social dispute at just about any time during which it operates. As such in the end we are left with little ultimate recourse in our disagreements but to consult the only truly neutral arbiter around: the material circumstances that we all share.

There is of course at least one other option: namely, refer to the ultimate empirical arbiter (ie the universe) to determine what actions are the most reliable instigators of widely appealing events. It has the advantage of being positive-sum (more or less by definition) at the cost of arbitrarily challenging verification and intelligibility. There is some degree of self-enforcement in that communities who manage to harvest the benefits of this approach's positive-sum windfall enjoy a selective pressure in their favour. However, this doesn’t offer much insight within any such community about how exactly to pursue such enforcement. In summary, then, this approach is all-in on mutual benefit (or inversely, fairly distributed harm/risk) at the precipitous cost of constant work offsetting the resulting challenges with respect to verifiability, intelligibility, and enforceability.

There is another saving grace for this roughly empiricist-utilitarian response to conflict though: its verification may not be easy, but it is simple.In some sense, if I want to know what the universe is like, I just have to step outside and look. The devil is in the details, of course, which is admittedly what makes the effort so challenging. But another advantage is that I can by design adjust the mediation process over time to improve the appeal of its outcomes. Not so for coin-flipping. Moreover, the universe overall is (more or less by definition) without any personal bias whatsoever. The subset consisting of my body is biased in basically all the ways I am, but there is a meaningful sense indeed in which facts sui generis do not care about any person’s feelings. The universe overall is therefore the most neutral arbiter available for just about any project of social conflict mediation imaginable.

The Socratic Method and the importance of recognizing and responding to the times in which we live: "Socrates is Mortal"

(Plus- David Hume)

“A sign of intelligence is an awareness of one’s own ignorance.” – Niccolò Machiavelli Jiayan teaching puts forward a number of claims or statements on the nature of Reality. While all are key to understanding the way in which our universe works, they operate across different levels. Think of Jiayan claims as a sort of pyramid. At the bottom rest its most central claims. If any of those are…

Abstract

This paper critiques core tenets of feminist studies through the lens of evolutionary psychology, arguing that many claims – such as those concerning patriarchy, social constructionism, fat studies, rape, ecofeminism, and lived experience – lack empirical support and are shaped more by ideology than science. It begins by reassessing the feminist concept of patriarchy, traditionally seen as a deliberate male power structure, and instead proposes it as an emergent outcome of evolutionary pressures around reproduction and resource allocation. The paper then critiques fat studies, which often dismiss biological and medical consensus on obesity in favor of social constructionist views. Drawing on evolutionary psychology, the analysis highlights that human preferences for certain body types are not arbitrary but reflect adaptive traits related to health and fertility. Feminist theories of rape are also examined, particularly the view that rape is solely about power and not sexual motivation. The paper presents an evolutionary perspective that considers rape a maladaptive reproductive strategy, arguing that ignoring sexual motivation oversimplifies a complex issue and limits explanatory accuracy. Overall, the paper contends that feminist studies have increasingly prioritized ideological narratives over empirical inquiry, influenced by Marxist and postmodernist critiques. The article concludes that, rather than serving as a neutral academic discipline, feminist studies now functions predominantly as an advocacy platform – one better suited to political settings – while empirical inquiry into gendered behavior should be pursued within disciplines adhering to stricter methodological standards.

==

Friday 2025 December 28th — 11:06 am。’s

Entry ;

I have a whole other bag of books to study for my Graduation Dissertation and I am SO excited to keep up the researches. I have to find a book at the library, hopefully I’ll be lucky enough find it.