Dr. Stephen Hicks
speaker
174 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Stephen Hicks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And our cognitive powers, if we have a good healthy epistemology, should be augmented to enable us to survive and flourish better in the world.
That's exactly right. But then, if you, however, are skeptical, if you do start with the epistemology, all of the postmoderns do come out of an epistemological training. It's a striking fact, you know, the big-name postmoderns, so we mentioned Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Rorty, right, and the others, they are all PhDs in philosophy, right?
They're all doing heavy-duty work in epistemology at their graduate and doctoral level work. And that does come to become the foundation. And because of the time that they are working in, middle part of the 20th century was an extraordinarily skeptical phase for philosophy. The revealing theories and paradigms that everyone had been excited about had collapsed at that time. So they came of age.
Now, what that then is to say is, if you don't think... that human beings can know the world as individuals, then you don't think of developing your reason, developing your capacity for logic, for rationality, for understanding is the most important thing about human beings. So what then is it to be a human being?
And to the extent that you devalue the human cognitive apparatus, then we are going to become closer to chimps. And then the social models that are prevalent about how we think chimps are going to operate in the world. are going to become more predominant. Or even lower than chimps, baboons. Yeah, it's more of a baboon model.
I think this shows the absolute importance of these cognitive issues that the psychologists and the philosophers are trying to work out positively. Because to the extent that we can show that we have cognition, that it is efficacious, that it is competent, that our brain, mind is an enormously powerful tool. And if we learn to use it well, we will survive and flourish better as individuals.
And socially, we'll start to work out the win-win positive, some social things. Otherwise, we will sort of regress socially and evolutionary to chimp and baboon kinds of levels.
That's right. They're all left with it. That's right. That's what they're left with. You're getting rid of human cognitive power as a positive thing. Then you ask, well, what's left? If it's not the case that I think my human cognition
my mind puts me in touch with reality and that i can work out reality and that your cognition puts you in touch with reality and of course maybe we're initially focusing on things we have different frameworks but that we nonetheless have the cognitive tools to talk about these things to do the experiments to you know i can visit you what you've experienced to take each other's position that's right in service of some higher goal
That's right. And that we can work all of these things out to, in effect, have an agreed upon understanding of the nature of reality. Then, if that's not what's going on, that cognition is about trying to use our minds to understand reality, reality starts to drop out of the picture. Right. And what the postmoderns then do is either say, well, I make up my own reality.
That's what's going on here. Or some of them are more passive. All of the influences of more environmental deterministic understandings of human beings. What we call learning and cognition is just being conditioned by your environment, your social upbringing, right, and so on. So, again, we don't have an autonomous… The dominant patriarchy.
Yeah, or there could be any sort of social structure from their perspective. But that then means that what we are interested in is primarily social relationships, right?
not me in relation to reality and other people are part of reality so i have to work that out but rather the assumption is that i am inextricably molded by and shaped by my social reality and so the dynamic between us socially is the thing that comes to be and the word there that becomes most important is the power word It's a kind of social power.
Oh yeah, absolutely. It's the social construction theory that leads them to have that social understanding of power. But the power for them cannot be the positive sum
kind of power that we're talking about because that understanding of positive sum power depends on we can figure out the way the world works and do science and technology and make the world better place and empower ourselves we can learn better nutrition to make our bodies more powerful i can understand that you're a rational person uh and you can understand that i'm a rational person so i have to treat you a certain way conversationally socially and so forth uh
So all of the positive, some social stuff is going to come out of that. But the postmoderns have cut all of that away. All you're left with is beings that are conditioned and trying to recondition each other in a social world that is totally social world. And what they then call power just is the influence or tools, including the tools of language.
that are now understood as to have nothing to do with the nature of reality, but as being socially constructed themselves. And tools of power. That's right. And so it becomes then necessarily a zero-sum, socially influencing and controlling game. And they reinterpret everything in terms of that.
That can take us back to the Peterson Academy courses, too.
i've done five courses yes three are in post-production two are okay and what are the three that are coming up one is on modern ethics uh so uh what has happened in the modern world is it has become more diverse more global more multicultural and more critical in some ways of traditional models that have come down to us so it's a much more wide open
world what's interesting about the modern world is how little we have uh what i think of as kind of homogeneous cultures where everybody by and large on the same philosophical that's the collapse of that meta narrative yeah that particular went away and so we have a huge number of people trying to work out what is good what is bad what's right what is wrong what's the meaning of my life how should we organize ourselves socially so what i did was uh chose uh eight
Showing 141–160 of 174 · page 8 of 9
← Previous
Next →