[p2p-research] The difference between anarchism and libertarianism

[Ryan Lanham]

There is room for speculative theory, and it is going to happen,
regardless.  Falsification is a good standard, but not the only one. The
trouble with experiments in behavioral economics, etc. is that the knowledge
found may be temporal, cultural and essentially inductive.  Humans aren't
molecules or simple bio-systems.  They change, re-evaluate, plan, etc.  We
can't even say whether something like homosexuality is purely hardwired yet
in all cases with clear science.  Human science moves slowly and may have no
forward given are changing nature.

That said, the left has always been big on moral high ground.  They just
KNOW better than the rest of us how we all ought to be living.  It's great
work if you can get it...usually at a state-funded university, of course.

The right is equally ridiculous with human nature arguments, in my view.

To my mind it all comes back to accountability.  You have to be accountable
to your "peers."  Unfortunately, the meaning of peer has gotten to be pretty
narrow--those who think like me and generally those who get paid to think
like me.

A peer isn't a journal editor...it is the rigorous review of an engaged
public--informed and uninformed. Few philosophers have much interest in that
sort of vetting because those people "just don't understand" or are "too
ignorant to have a "valid" opinion.  I've yet to meet one serious
philosopher who doesn't express that they have learned huge amounts by
trying to blog.  Uttering good sense in truly timely and open frameworks is
the gold standard of publishing as far as I'm concerned.  Is there a lot of
drivel?  Of course.  Is it still the toughest audience--yep.  I defy anyone
to prove there is a valid need for "scholarly" publishing outlets.

John Connell has been talking about the problems of status-induced
authority.  He is on the mark.  What we need, I suspect, is more P2P
scholarship.  More P2P criticism.   The cultural barriers to that...and to
the idea of not having a sinecure high horse from which to preach from, are
great.  It is interesting to live in the times when those walls seem to be
decaying.

Ryan




Ryan Lanham
rlanham1963 at gmail.com
Facebook: Ryan_Lanham
"You'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone"



On Sat, Jun 13, 2009 at 11:41 PM, Stan Rhodes <stanleyrhodes at gmail.com>wrote:

> Tomas' view of in and out-group behavior being the realm of evolutionary
> psychology is not accurate.  Plenty of human behavior is empirically
> verifiable, and studied by various fields within the general discipline of
> psychology.  Ev psych just constructs a narrative on top of those findings,
> which may or may not be useful.  One must to separate what the psychological
> evidence presents, and what an ev psych narrative speculates--separate the
> behavior from the story about the behavior.
>
> So yes, evolutionary psychology IS very speculative, but can be useful when
> it proposes a hypotheses that can actually be tested.  Unfortunately, many
> times ev psych establishes an attractive and convenient narrative that
> researchers too willingly accept.  I only see ev psych narratives as useful
> when practiced with full awareness of these limitations; good psychologists
> know a story is still just a story.
>
> However, the dismissal of human nature as a "useful context because of the
> extent of social construction and the difficulty in isolating cross-cultural
> universals – of which there are few if any, and none of them politically
> relevant" is completely baseless, and wrong.  Plenty of cross-cultural
> universals have been found in behavior economics and the psychology of trust
> and reciprocation, and they couldn't be more politically relevant.
>
> The literature on human cognition and decision making questions many
> assumptions in each political view.  We should not be surprised: those
> views, too, are narratives built upon normative statements that can be--and
> usually are--quite assumptive.  And, quite honestly, I'm not even sure what
> "social construction" means now.  The term was used to help challenge
> assumptions held too dearly, but now I only see it used as a philosophical
> hand-wave when uncomfortable scientific facts enter the scene.  "Social
> construction" is either obvious or irrelevant.
>
> You say that "it is comforting for middle-class worshippers of order to
> fantasise that things are alright, but this perspective is only possible by
> hiding inside a protective sphere."
>
> For your consideration: it's comforting for political philosophers to
> fantasize that they are right about human behavior and its implications, but
> that perspective is only possible by refusing to falsify their own
> assumptions.
>
> I'll admit, that's not entirely fair: all humans experience confirmation
> bias.
>
> -- Stan
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> p2presearch mailing list
> p2presearch at listcultures.org
> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090614/91a7fe2c/attachment.html>