The Virtue of Integrity
Russell Turpin
In article <99...@cbnewsh.ATT.COM>, r...@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (r.w.stubblefield) writes:
> ... What does intellectual integrity consist of? ...
In part, intellectual integrity is the honest attempt to
understand what others write, what problems they attempted to
solve, and what is the essence of their position before making a
critique of them. In part, it is including in one's critique the
understanding one has arrived of these things. In part, it is
not pretending that the destruction of straw men and the spewing
of cheap aphorisms is philosophy.
That someone who has posted a series of intellectually bankrupt
vignettes has the gall to lecture on intellectual integrity is
enough to turn the stomach.
Russell
Brian Yoder
>-----
>In article <99...@cbnewsh.ATT.COM>, r...@cbnewsh.ATT.COM (r.w.stubblefield) writes:
>> ... What does intellectual integrity consist of? ...
>In part, intellectual integrity is the honest attempt to
>understand what others write, what problems they attempted to
>solve, and what is the essence of their position before making a
>critique of them. In part, it is including in one's critique the
>understanding one has arrived of these things. In part, it is
>not pretending that the destruction of straw men and the spewing
>of cheap aphorisms is philosophy.
>That someone who has posted a series of intellectually bankrupt
Rather than asserting that Stubblefield's stuff is intellectually bankrupt
wouldn't it be better if you described why you thought so?
>vignettes has the gall to lecture on intellectual integrity is
>enough to turn the stomach.
This seems quite explicitly hypocritical. Is this attack an example of
intellectual integrity on your part? At least Stubblefield was explaining
his disagreements with others.
Brian Yoder
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Russell Turpin
In article <1990Apr30....@smcnet.smc.edu>, byo...@smcnet.smc.edu (Brian Yoder) writes:
> Rather than asserting that Stubblefield's stuff is intellectually bankrupt
> wouldn't it be better if you described why you thought so?
I thought I had explained why I thought so. Stubblefield's postings
have consistently caricatured past writers, seemingly for the
sole purpose of dismissing their work.
To take one example, he critiques Russell on the basis that the
formalization of implication in _Principia does not adequately
capture the idea of causal implication. Guess what? Russell
himself realized this. His intent was to formalize mathematics,
not all knowledge. Both Russell and Frege before him had
considered various problems in formalizing implication, including
the one or two that Stubblefield mentions. Russell's
formalization of implication was only intended to serve a limited
purpose, and it serves that purpose well. (Material implication
is used in all standard mathematics today.)
To take a second example, Stubblefield attempts to dismiss
philosophers from Hume to James on the ground that they accept
the "sensualist" premise. He says (as near as I can understand
him) that these philosophers refuse to acknowledge that human
perception organizes sense data. In this, Stubblefield is wrong.
Hume saw trees just like the rest of us. The question is not
whether human perception organizes sense data, but how we can be
sure that it does not introduce errors into our knowledge in so
doing.
Stubblefield has dismissed major philosophers from Kant to
Russell without once quoting their work. He never explains the
philosphical problems on which they worked, nor the historical
context in which these problems were set. If not dishonesty,
this is at least intellectual sloppiness that verges on
dishonesty.
(And no, I am not being hypocritical here. Stubblefield's
postings are here on the net before us both. Since they are
short and you can easily go back and read the last five, there is
no need for me to excerpt them. If I misinterpret him, he can
correct me himself. As Rand would point out, context is
important. If Stubblefield had written scads of books and it
were unclear to which of his works I referred, if he lived at
another time, if we were not his intended audience, and if he
were not here on the net with us, *then* you could complain that
I was treating him unfairly the way he unfairly treats Hume and
Russell.)
Russell
Clayton Glad
on Stubblefield's posting on intellectual integrity byo...@smcnet.smc.edu
(Brian Yoder) writes:
>This seems quite explicitly hypocritical. Is this attack an example of
>intellectual integrity on your part? At least Stubblefield was explaining
>his disagreements with others.
It simply isn't true that Stubblefield is explaining his disagreements
with others. He's not even engaged in discourse with anyone. Elsewhere
in this group someone called his postings "caricatures", but that can't
be right since even these contain some germ of the truth. Stubblefield's
essays are misleading and clearly unrepresentative of the work he means
to examine.
Maybe some of the people engaged in this discussion were not around for
the beginnings of the Stubblefield era in sci.philosophy.tech. At that
time a number of people *did* treat his postings with some seriousness.
Notably, he posted a number of messages which he claimed to be criticisms
of contemporary realism in philosophy. It was pointed out repeatedly that
the view he was criticizing was the one relevant to the medieval realism/
nominalism controversy and as such *not* what contemporary philosophers
(eg of science, etc) meant by their use of that term.
I tried to engage Stubblefield in some discussion of this by email, but
he insisted I was wrong and quoted "the defintion of `realism'" from
some dictionary of philosophy -- compounding the original difficulty.
When I pointed out a number of sources *besides* a dictionary which
he might consult he accused me of condescending to him and told me that
I could not "think in univerals".
So it's really quite a vacuous criticism to say that this group won't
meet Stubblefield's postings with reasoned analysis -- they're the
electronic equivalent of slapping homemade flyers all over brick walls.
Russell Turpin has given a concise *selection* of the misrepresentations
Stubblefield made in his posting on Russell. Will we see a response?
Not likely, since we know from an earlier rant that his kill file is
an enemies list of names of those who have criticized the form or content
of his nonsense.
-- Clay
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Clayton Glad (gl...@csli.stanford.edu)
* Stanford Philosophy
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r.w.stubblefield
The Virtue of Integrity
Ayn Rand identified six virtues that are derivatives of, special
cases of, or principles subsumed under the fundamental virtue of
rationality. The virtue of integrity is one of these six.
Writing in *Atlas Shrugged,* she said:
Integrity is the recognition of the fact that you cannot
fake your consciousness . . . that man is an indivisible
entity, an integrated unit . . . of matter and
consciousness, and that he may permit no breach between body
and mind, . . . he may not sacrifice his convictions to the
wishes of others, . . . that courage and confidence are
practical necessities, that courage is the practical
form of being true to existence, . . ., and confidence is
the practical form of being true to one's own consciousness.
What is the principle of integrity? What facts of reality give
rise to it, i.e., in what sense is it a special case of
rationality?
Objectivism holds that every virtue has an aspect pertaining to
consciousness and one to existence. What does intellectual
integrity consist of? What does existential integrity consist
of?
How does the Objectivist position on integrity relate to the
conventional view that you should not be a hypocrite?
[Thanks to Bennett Karp for providing the discussion writeup.]
Future Topics: May 11--Greed. May 18--Quine's Dogmas. May 25--
Idealism. June 1--What is logic? June 8--Caricatures and
Essentials.
--
Bob Stubblefield att!houxa!bobs 201-949-2846
r.w.stub...@ATT.COM