Great Epistemology from Bill Whittle

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I'm usually not a watcher of Pijamas Media, but I am a HUGE fan of the following video.

Bill Whittle shows just how devastating a common sense argument can be when it is properly grounded in great epistemology and a simple concrete is used to illustrate.

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This is a perfect example of what I have been talking about for a while--making sure you correctly identify something before you judge it. I call it the cognitive before the normative way of thinking.

I especially like the way he distances himself from controlling the truth by saying that the truth doesn't come to him, but instead, he has to go to the truth before he makes his opinions. As opposed to the left, where one person's truth is not that of another.

His example--the concrete--was, in my opinion, the most devastating part of his presentation in terms of impact on normal everyday people who are not too fluent in making strong mental images from abstractions. By that, I mean, he implanted an inoculation--an image--in people's mind that will make it almost impossible for a communist-like argument to penetrate. And he did it in a way that your average mainstream person finds almost impossible to disagree with. Actually, you have to agree with it.

The image he mentioned is that not one person tried to risk their lives swimming to Cuba from Miami, or crossing the Berlin wall illegally to get into communist Germany, yet countless people died and suffered untold tragedies doing the opposite. And the question is, if the life the lefties preach is so superior, then why does this happen when they get it?

I know Whittle isn't the first person to say this, but they way he anchored it to separating opinion from reality--including categorizing his own evaluations as opinion--raised this presentation to mastery. This is philosophical demolition of leftie stuff at its finest. And it was through epistemology at that.

I saw this video on Real Clear Politics (Bill Whittle On Far-Left's View Of Truth), not Pijamas Media. So it looks like somebody else was impressed with it, too.

Michael

[Mikee]

I'm usually not a watcher of Pijamas Media, but I am a HUGE fan of the following video.

...

Michael

This is good. I shared it on my facebook which probably means I'll get unfriended by about half my friends and family. That'll free up some time...

[Dennis Hardin]

It’s an excellent video for those who want a common sense approach to debunking the subjectivist notion of “your reality vs. my reality.”

For an in depth philosophical analysis of the underlying philosophical errors involved—i.e., logical positivism, linguistic analysis and other subjectivist schools which followed in their murky footsteps —see Brand Blanshard’s superb book, Reason and Analysis.

From a review on Amazon:

In a nutshell, Blanshard's view is that reason is the power of grasping necessary connections; that the universe itself is a coherent logical and causal whole, shot through with threads of necessity and in which every specific "fact" is entailed by every other if we could but see it fully; that to understand something is to see it in the context of its necessary relations to that whole; and that this whole operates causally on our minds to lead us to truth through logic.

[BaalChatzaf]

I saw this video on Real Clear Politics (Bill Whittle On Far-Left's View Of Truth), not Pijamas Media. So it looks like somebody else was impressed with it, too.

Michael

Whittle and Kleven are my favorite PJTV guys.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[psychoanaleesis]

Great video! I strive to "go to the truth" and be on the side of evidence whenever I discuss something and not merely rely on what my experience if I have the time to research about it. Using this method, I made a classmate who's a lay minister of the Augustinian order snarl, literally. My, my...

Edited September 8, 2011 by David Lee