Epistemology Ontology

Jack Wilson Epistemology/Ontology

A2 Empiricism

1. Empiricism does not account for the fact that experience is contextual. When I see something, I do not see it in isolation from the rest of the world, it is always given in a context. There is always a background against which something appears.

2. Empiricism does not give the mind an active role in cognition. In empiricism, the mind is just a passive receiver, except for its role of ordering what it receives. This is problematic because my mind can delineate between what I have not experienced and what is not real. For instance, just because I have not been to Antarctica does not mean that Antarctica does not exist.

3. Any conception of ethics that relies on time as a concept, such as empiricism is irrational and must be rejected. Folger explains,

[Below] the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so

short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-

43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now. Efforts to understand time below the Planck scale have led to an exceedingly strange juncture in physics. The problem, in brief, is that Time may not exist at the most fundamental level of physical reality. If so, then what is time? And why is it so obviously and tyrannically omnipresent in our own experience? “The meaning of time has become terribly problematic in contemporary physics,” says Simon Saunders, a philosopher of physics at the University of Oxford. “The situation is so uncomfortable that by far the best thing to do is declare oneself an agnostic.” The trouble with time

started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes . Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos)

seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny). Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time. “One

finds [for example] time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation [a fundamental equation of quantum physics] ,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille,

France. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that [also] the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless. ” No one has yet succeeded in using the Wheeler-DeWitt equation to

integrate quantum theory with general relativity. Nevertheless, a sizable minority of physicists, Rovelli included, believe that any successful merger of the two great masterpieces of 20th-century physics will inevitably describe a universe in which, ultimately, there is no time. The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” It may be the biggest, but it is far from the only temporal conundrum. Vying for second place is this strange fact: The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it. “It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT. (When I ask him what time it is, he answers, “Beats me. Are we done?”) “The usual explanation of this is that in order to specify what happens to a system, you not only have to specify the physical laws, but you have to specify some initial or final condition.” The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in

entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time. [as] time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. Most of us tend to think of time the way Newton did: “Absolute, true and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own

nature, flows equably, without regard to anything external.” But as Einstein proved, time is part of the fabric of the universe. Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all. “I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your

clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe:

[but] is defined by the number of clicks of [a] clocks [and is not an independently functioning variable ].” Rovelli, the advocate of a timeless universe, says the NIST timekeepers have it right. Moreover, their point of view is consistent with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation. “We never really see time,” he

says. “We see only clocks. If you say this object moves, what you really mean is that this object is here when the hand of your clock is here, and so on. We say we measure time with clocks, but we see only the hands of the clocks, not time itself. And the hands of a clock are a physical variable like any other. So in a sense we cheat because what we really observe are physical variables as a function of other physical variables, but we represent that as if everything is evolving in time. “What happens with the Wheeler-DeWitt equation is that we have to stop playing this game. Instead of introducing this fictitious variable—time, which itself is not observable—we should just describe how the variables are related to one another. The question is, Is time a fundamental property of reality or

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just the macroscopic appearance of things? I would say it’s only a macroscopic effect. It’s something that emerges only for big things.”

Or: read the Kantian epistemology as the NC and weigh between the philosophies.

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A2 A Priori Reason

1. Experimental reason is inevitable because all moral knowledge is based in previous dispositions – a priori reason is not possible. Blackburn,

What is true is that we ‘find ourselves’ with this or that concern, and if the experience is unpleasant, as when we find ourselves shamefully addicted to something, or obsessed by something or someone, or for that matter guiltily ceasing to care for things or people we once did care for, then it can feel as if we are assailed from outside, a victim of forces not of our own making. But, after all, it is always forces not of our own making that are responsible for who we are in the first place: in my case, they have made me into a

middle-aged white male of a certain education and class: in your case, probably something not too dissimilar, by historical and global standards. Kant’s aim was to present the true self, the deliberator, as free from all that. He (or she) is not an embodiment of a social view, or religion, or class, or gender, but simply of reason and morality. But nothing on this earth that makes deliberations is free of his or her natural and acquired dispositions as they

do so. You, when you deliberate, are whatever you are: a person of tangled desires, conflicting attitudes to your parents, inchoate ambitions,

preferences, and ideals, with an inherited ragbag of attitudes to different actions, situations, and characters. You do not manage, ever, to stand apart from all that. Once more, the Kantian fantasy remains seductive. There is an emotional pressure to think we can transcend these given facts about ourselves. Christine Korsgaard maintains that the ‘reflective structure of human consciousness’ gives us a necessary distance from our desires and impulses. But the claim is ambiguous, and right only in a sense which does not help the

Kantian. In the sense in which it is right, it means only that one can stand back from a particular desire or impulse, and accept or reject its pressure on one. Certainly we can do this, in the light of other desires and concerns. What is not thereby given is that we can do it from a standpoint independent of any desire or concern: independent of a desire for our own good , or for the happiness of humanity, or respect for this or that, or the

myriad of other passions that make up our individual profiles of concern and care.

2. A priori reason only gives partial truth as not all moral facts can be attained merely from a priori knowledge as morality and ethics do not exist in a vacuum.

3. We can only know our own perspective, it is impossible to use a priori reason to formulate universal ethical laws, which is what my opponent attempts to do. Nietzsche,

The falsity of human judgment derives firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the basis

of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every individual piece of this material is in turn the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with absolute necessity. Our experience of another person , for example, no matter how close he stand to us, can never be complete , so that we would have a logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature and are bound to be. Finally, the

standard by which we measure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess the relation between ourself and anything else whatever. (Aphorism #32) [Frederich Nietzsche. “Human, All too Human.” Print.]

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A2 Divine Command Theory

1. God does not exist – either he is evil and we should reject him, or he’s impotent and irrelevant. Harris,

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God

drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all. Of course,

people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality . But, of course,

human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man. There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard

Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion -- to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions, and religious diversions of scarce resources --

is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist,

by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

2. If their framework is true, then God would have to incoherently command himself. Austin,

On Divine Command Theory, it problematically appears that God’s goodness consists in God doing whatever he wills to do. This problem has been given voice by Leibniz (1951), and has recently been discussed by Quinn (1978), Wierenga (1989), Alston (1989), and Wainright (2005). The problem is this: if what it means for an action to be morally required is that it be commanded by God, then God’s doing what he is obligated to do is equivalent to his doing what he commands himself to do. This, however, is incoherent. While it makes sense to conceive of God as forming an intention to do an action, or judging that it would be good

to do an action, the notion that he commands himself to do an action is incoherent. Moreover, on Divine Command Theory,

God could not be seen as possessing moral virtues, because a moral virtue would be a disposition to do an action that God commands. This is also incoherent.

3. God is an external agent that applies rules to human behavior, which means that if their framework is true then we also have an obligation to abide by other external rules, such as contracts.

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http://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/


4. There are multiple religions with multiple interpretations of truth, which makes divine command theory not possible because it is irresolvable.

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A2 Subjectivity

1. Humans can to know objective moral truths even if they cannot completely conceptualize them. Finlay,

But we must distinguish between the conditions for a concept‘s possible realization, and the conditions for meaningful application of that concept, which extend to its application to merely imaginary, impossible worlds. We understand what it would mean for a polygon to have three sides but not have three angles, even if we cannot conceive of such a polygon itself.

2. Cogntivism is true, morality is not subjective – moral statements are truth propositions. McCord,

Moreover, realists point out, moral language exhibits all the tell-tale signs of cognitive discourse: we seem to hold moral beliefs, have moral disagreements, seek evidence for our opinions; we act as if there were something to discover, as if we could be mistaken, as if there is a fact of the matter; and we even talk of moral claims being true or false, and of people knowing the better we think that moral statements are cognitive. It doesn’t say metphsically which is brue, but liingusitically we speak them as true/false. That doesn’t mean it is true. Our opinions are expressed as true/false. But there is no factual

claim. There is a difference between speaking of things as true-functional and its actually being true/false. (even while doing the worse). Indeed , moral claims are apparently indistinguishable in logical form and within inferential contexts from claims that are recognized as cognitive. These characteristics of moral discourse are not merely flukes of the language, they reflect the phenomenology of moral experience -- it's a phenomenology that represents obligation as a constraint on, and value as giving direction to, our actions independently of what we might happen to desire. All told, realists argue,

cognitivism offers the best psychological and linguistic account of moral language.] Warrant – moral realists think that it exhibtits moral language. Signs of cognitive discourse.

3. Moral statements are truth functional since they can be used as premises, conditions and conclusions of inference. If they have no truth-value then no universal conditions can be drawn, which means the resolution is automatically false.

4. Non-cognitivism prevents people from believing their conclusions since they can never be universally true or false. This is problematic since we can never affirm the resolution if we cannot believe in our conclusions – everything would be assumed false otherwise.

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5. The mere fact that we seek evidence for our opinions proves cognitivism true because we look to justify our internal beliefs as true or false.

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A2 Skepticism

1. Skepticism is avoided by accepting a margin of error in our ethical statements. Parfit,

We may not be able to prove that our normative epistemic beliefs are not illusions. We may also be unable to prove that we are not brains in a vat, or being deceived by some demon. But if we claim less than absolute certainty, we can justifiably reject such skeptical views. In arguing that we can know some normative epistemic truths, we must

appeal to some of these truths. We must claim that we have reasons to believe that we can respond to reasons. Such arguments are in one way circular, but that does not make them fail. Any justification must end somewhere. Justifications of beliefs can best end with intrinsic credibilities and decisive epistemic reasons. We do not have to show that we have further reasons to believe that we have these reasons, and further reasons to believe that we have these further reasons, and so on forever. Some beliefs seem indubitable, and we seem to have decisive reasons to accept many other beliefs. Nor do we seem to have any strong reason to doubt that we do have such reasons. Given these facts, if we can understand how it might be true that we are responding to such reasons,

we can justifiably believe that we are responding to such reasons. We can justifiably believe that there are some truths about what we ought to believe,

and that we know some of these truths.

2. Humans can to know objective moral truths even if they cannot completely conceptualize them. Finlay,

But we must distinguish between the conditions for a concept‘s possible realization, and the conditions for meaningful application of that concept, which extend to its application to merely imaginary, impossible worlds. We understand what it would mean for a polygon to have three sides but not have three angles, even if we cannot conceive of such a polygon itself.

3. There are non‐natural facts, including facts about reasons for action and reasons for belief – all the concerns here are normative.

4. Relative morality does not mean morality does not exist – and it also can be reconciled. Explain why the AC can reconcile the relative/subjective morality if possible.]

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A2 Foundationalism

1. Collapses to subjectivity because there is no way to know any perceptions other than my own; however, I do not even necessarily understand those perceptions to begin with. Nietzsche,

The falsity of human judgment derives firstly from the condition of the material to be judged, namely very incomplete, secondly from the way in which the sum is arrived at on the basis

of this material, and thirdly from the fact that every individual piece of this material is in turn the outcome of false knowledge, and is so with absolute necessity. Our experience of another person , for example, no matter how close he stand to us, can never be complete , so that we would have a logical right to a total evaluation of him; all evaluations are premature and are bound to be. Finally, the

standard by which we measure, our own being, is not an unalterable magnitude, we are subject to moods and fluctuations, and yet we would have to know ourselves as a fixed standard to be able justly to assess the relation between ourself and anything else whatever. (Aphorism #32) [Frederich Nietzsche. “Human, All too Human.” Print.]

2. Foundationalism is unverifiable insofar as it is impossible to know which perception is inevitably correct or has the most truth value.

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A2 Feminism Essentialism

1. Essentialist feminism reinforces gender stereotypes through valorization of women’s differences, harming ourselves and our listeners, and killing the transformative power of their critique. Young,

Within the context of antifeminist backlash, the effect of gynocentric feminism may be accommodating to the existing structure. Gynocentric feminism relies on and reinforces gender stereotypes at just the time when the dominant culture has put new emphasis on marks of

gender difference. It does so, moreover, by relying on many of those aspects of women's traditional sphere that traditional patriarchal ideology has most exploited and that humanist feminists such as Beauvoir found most oppressive--reproductive biology, motherhood,

s domestic concerns. Even though its intentions are subversive, such renewed attention to traditional femininity can have a reactionary effect on both ourselves and our listeners because it may echo the dominant claim that women belong in a separate sphere. Humanist feminism calls upon patriarchal society to open places for women within those spheres of human activity that have been considered the most

creative, powerful, and prestigious. Gynocentric feminism replies that wanting such things for women implies a recognition that such activities are the most humanly valuable. It argues that in fact,

militarism, bureaucratic hierarchy , competition for recognition, and the instrumentalization of nature and people entailed by these activities are basic disvalues. Yet in contemporary society, men still have most institutionalized power, and gynocentric feminism shows why they do not use it well . If feminism turns its back on the centers of power, privilege, and individual achievement that men have monopolized, those men will continue to monopolize them, and nothing significant will change. Feminists cannot undermine masculinist values without entering some of the centers of power that foster

them, but the attainment of such power itself requires at least appearing to foster those values. Still, without being willing to risk such co -optation, feminism can be only a moral position of critique rather than a force for institutional change. Despite its intention, I

fear that gynocentric feminism may have the same consequence as the stance of moral motherhood that

grew out of nineteenth century feminism a resegregation of women to a specifically women's sphere, outside the sites of power, privilege, and recognition. For me the symptom here is what the dominant culture finds more threatening. Within the dominant culture a middle -aged assertive

woman's claim to coanchor the news alongside a man appears considerably more threatening than women's claim to have a different voice that exposes masculinist values as body -denying and selfish. The claim of women to have a right to the positions and benefits that have hitherto been reserved for men, and that male dominated institutions should serve women's needs, is a direct threat to male privilege. While the claim that these positions of power themselves should be eliminated and the institutions eliminated or restructured is indeed more radical, when asserted from the gynocentric feminist position it can be an objective retreat.Gynocentrism’s focus on values and language as the primary target of its critique contributes to this blunting of its political force. Without

doubt, social change requires changing the subject, which in turn means developing new ways of speaking, writing, and imagining. Equally indubitable is the gynocentric feminist claim that masculinist values in Western culture deny the body , sensuality, and rootedness in nature and that such denial nurtures fascism, pollution, and nuclear games. Given these facts, however, what shall we do? To this gynocentrism has little concrete answer . Because its criticism of existing society is so global and abstract, gynocentric critique of values, language, and culture of masculinism can remove feminist theory from analysis of specific institutions and practices, and how they might be concretely structurally changed in directions more consonant with our visions.

2. Read the micropolitics file.

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A2 Irony

1. Turn – the most ironic thing to do would be to pick up the most literal debater.

2. Irony as an effective political tool would require the judge to share the debater’s predispositions about the nature of certain ideologies. This is true because arguments can only appear ironic if both the debater and judge believe that the implications of certain arguments are able to be mocked via their annunciation. This puts them in a double bind. A. Their irony has absolutely no political implications and fail as a project or B. the judge already recognizes the value and the irony isn’t subversive.

3. If engaging in actions that are unexpected and subversive is truly an ideal course of action, then you would always vote for me because the ultimate irony would be to vote for the person who is being unironic.

4. There is no intrinsic weighing mechanism for determining the amount of ideological disruption that needs to occur in order to justify voting for an ironic position. Any critical argument could theoretically have some political implication, and without any standard to calculate or weigh between such competing advocacies you will never be able to vote for an ironic position because its benefits are speculative at best.

5. Irony is impossible to weigh since there is no brightline as to when something is more ironic than something else, which means you should always default to my form of debate since it’s resolvable.

6. Turn – wrong forum; everybody in the debate community is conservative so they will just laugh at you. My ironic responses to irony are better because I am both embracing the ironic mindset and responding to it with that same mindset.

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Epistemology Ontology