Jay Dyer's transcendental argument for God, which claims that only the Orthodox Christian worldview can account for the presuppositions of knowledge (such as logic, causality, and meaning), is fundamentally flawed because it misrepresents key philosophical concepts (like Hume's is-ought problem and Aristotle's law of non-contradiction), relies on circular reasoning without proper justification, and fails to address the infinite number of possible worldviews that would need to be refuted.
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Speed running Jay Dyer
Added:Hopefully we're live and this is all good. I always get confused by this bit. I think we're live. Let's see. I'll have a look at a little chat.
Give me a shout when you can see me.
Yeah, I think we're good.
slow running. Yeah, I am slow running.
All right, I'm just going to wait till I can see myself on the stream.
Okay, good. I think people are saying they can see me, so that means that we're good. All right. Okay. Um, god damn, I've been watching a lot of Jay Dire recently, which has been quite painful. anyone who knows anyone who's suffered uh in that particular fate themselves before hopefully you can sympathize um the sacrifices I am making for my art. Um so cheers. Got a nice cool beer.
What I was going to try and do tonight was do something a bit bit different to before. A bit more ambitious. I'm kind of stretching my streaming skills a bit.
Loaded in a bunch of clips and I'm going to try and work my way through them. And I think what I want to do on this session is um address some of the stuff from Jire on a couple of different levels. So obviously he if you don't know who he is, let's start with this background. First of all, last couple of streams we've been doing orthodox priest up debate bro people. So we did Jim Bob, we did Father Deacon Ananas, and now we're doing Jire.
So they're they're a gang of three, let's say. Um, and yeah, so so they they run broadly the same sorts of arguments. Um certainly FDA and Jay are quite tight and they say the same stuff. Um so I think it makes sense to sort of wrap up this little set this little uh series by finishing off with Jay. So he's a preup. If you've seen the last two videos, it's very similar stuff. I imagine actually that most people watching this uh know who he is because he's quite famous um on on the internet in these circles.
Give me a shout if my if my sound hopefully you can hear that tapping and I'm it's coming through the right microphone this week. But give me a shout if the levels are are okay.
Um and I previously had a discussion a debate was it a debate was a discussion with Jay in the past um on presuppositional stuff and I'm not going to show any clips from that discussion tonight for a couple of reasons. Partly it's kind of cringe looking back on it now. Um I I listened to a bit of it. I listened to a bit of um of of Nathan's comment uh sort of bad apologetics review thing. They did a 7h hour stream and I don't know half an hour of that was them watching it. And um although that was hilarious their their commentary was hilarious. I did sort of it did make me think I I let Jay have far too much time to talk and I wasn't challenging him very much. I'm not very confrontational like that. And that I think in a way gave people the impression that what he was saying was more coherent than than it actually was listening back to it. Um, and I think I wanna I want to sort of expose some of that tonight because I think actually since that in the five years or whatever it's been since then I've seen quite a lot more of Jay Dia's stuff and um sometimes he's very unpleasant and um I think it's fair enough to go in on you know his philosophy for what for lack of a better word. Um, I'm going to go into that in quite a lot of depth at some point towards like as we as we go through this stream, we get deeper and deeper basically. Um, so if you're a J Dh fan, and I hope there are J D fans who who can um challenge themselves to watch this type of video. Uh, feel free to skip over the beginning bits if you if you want to, but um I think that those the first bits are going to be important, too. But just rest assured, we we're going to have some fun at the beginning, but we're also going to get into the actual content um as as we keep going. So, I'm not going to shy away from any of the the philosophy. Um even though to begin with, we're going to be talking about some stuff that's not exactly philosophical content, but it's stuff about like Jay in particular. And I think it's fair to bring that up in this context um because of the type of character that he is in some respect.
What I mean by that is that often he displays behaviors that seem to me rather unhelpful for let's say a philosophy communicator if that's how he takes himself to be. Um he he's he's not just a philosophy he's not just a YouTube philosopher. He's also I think it's fair to say a conspiracy theorist.
You know he goes on he's been on the Alex Jones show. People will know that he recently went on Tucker Carlson. So, he's in this kind of right-wing ecosphere on online. Uh has written a book about um whatever like conspiracy theories in the and Hollywood that type of stuff, right? So, he's he's also a comedian and has kind of comedy series on his YouTube channel as well. He's a he's a Jay of all trades. Um so, he's not just a philosopher, but I'm I'm going to dig into the the philosophical content. I guess I just have a grumble about so the way he carries himself and um I don't think it he needs to do that and he he should I I should have been more forceful when we talked before in calling that type of stuff out. Um although I guess he was perfectly polite to me when we talked. So maybe maybe there was nothing for me to call out at that point. But I I I'm happy to to bring up some of these things now. So let's start off with the first clip.
So, the first one might not come as a surprise to some of you who've who've been following this stuff before. So, let's get on to this.
>> He's just got his head up his ass. He's just ignorant of philosophy. Like, literally go.
>> I have a masters in philosophy. You have no philosophy training. You would know that that's in a formal argument.
>> Right. So, there if you missed it, that's Jay Dier having a debate with Tump. I strongly recommend you don't watch that debate because it you will you will shorten your life listening to that. It's literally unlistenable. I mean, it's just two people talking over each other at the same time for about two hours and it goes nowhere and there's there's just no point in any of it. Um, but what happened there was T Jump, who's a who's a YouTuber who who is quite difficult to listen to at the best of times anyway. Um, whatever. I'm not throwing any shade on T Jump in this stream, but um he's not like an academic or anything either, just like Jay, but um Jay Jay pretended well Jay lent in and said to him, "I've got a master's degree," right? Because they were having a conversation about whether an appeal to authority was a was a fallacy. And Jay went in and said, "I've got a master's degree." And then something like, "You've got no philosophy degree." Hah. And laughed to himself about it. Um, and you know, first of all, it's a dick move, right?
It's a dick. You don't have to have a degree in philosophy to be good at philosophy, right? You definitely don't.
Um, before anyone tries to say, well, I'm Alex is being, you know, elitist and says you have to you have to have a degree or PhD or something. That's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying.
You definitely don't. But Jay is is saying that he does to someone who doesn't as a way of belittling them.
That's what he's doing. It's not philosophical. It's not It's just It's just a blatant power move. He's He's trying to humiliate T Jump by saying that he's got a degree in T Jump doesn't. Something along those lines, right? Um but then the thing is my friend um skeptical informant who had a debate with with Jay Dyier himself and he said that it's okay for me to say this. um he did some research and he phoned the uh college that Jay went to where he got his degree. Uh cuz Jay says he's got a master's degree in philosophy there. It's quite clear. He says it again in in the debate. He said it in other places as well. It's quite it's quite easy to find him saying that. Um but it turns out that that college never offered a master's degree in philosophy.
So it's not it's not it's not clear that that could be true. And if it's not true, Jay must have known that it's not true. And it's quite clear that his intent was to make the audience believe that it was true. And saying something that you know isn't true with the intent to get other people to believe it is a lie. That's what it means to lie. So Jay just lied there. Um and it's quite I mean I I believe that he that he lied. Um I also made a post about it on YouTube where I said I think J is lying about having a master's degree in philosophy. He went to Murray State University, but they seem to have never never offered a master's degree in philosophy. And you can check it yourself. Plug ask your favorite large language model to go and do a search to see if they've ever um done a master's degree in philosophy because I don't think you'll find that they did.
Jay replied to my post and he said, "I've always said and included ABT, all but thesis." Now, that is um I'm tempted to say another lie. Honestly, he's saying that he didn't, you know, I'm saying that he lied about that and his reply uh is to to lie again about whether he lied about it because I just played the clip and he didn't say um I've always included all but thesis. He didn't say it then. And I mean, he must have known at the time that he said it that he didn't have a master's degree.
And he must have known when he wrote this that on that occasion that he didn't say orbit thesis. So he doesn't always say an included orbit thesis.
Sometimes at least he leans in in a debate to try and humiliate someone by by claiming to have a degree that he doesn't have. Right? But it's kind of like if you just think about it for a moment, you know, again, I'm not saying he has to have a degree. It doesn't matter if he's got a degree, right? I'm not actually interested in whether he's got a degree, but the lies are the second lie. trying to say that he does, you know, that he always qualifies it and that that somehow, you know, that mitigating qualification that he chucks on the end, then in a way, if you think about it, it doesn't really it doesn't really help because like if you just do everything except pass the course by writing a thesis or whatever it is that they examine you on, um, all that means is that you at the very most if if we believe that somehow he did sit through M's level courses on on a degree course that they never offered, let's say maybe they did. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about that. And he sat through it. His line is that he he sat on those courses, but he just didn't he didn't do the the thesis at the end. But the thing is, the thesis doing the thing at the end that they examine you on is the thing, the public thing that um it means that somebody has has assessed you and said, "Yeah, this guy uh paid attention. He wasn't just sitting there, right? he learned something and he's he's able to demonstrate that by doing something like a thesis or an exam or a viviveror or whatever it is. And if you don't do that, then all you're saying is that you sat on some courses, right? Anybody could do that. It doesn't mean that you've passed. It doesn't mean you've got a master's degree, right? Because you could have been anywhere on this on the scale of between being brilliant and, you know, would have passed definitely if he'd done it to was failing completely and didn't wouldn't have passed. and we don't know where he sits because he didn't do the thesis.
So, you know, you don't get to claim that you've got a master's degree if you didn't do the thing, the hard thing that people who do it do in order to get told by a peer or by like an academic or an authority that you you did your bit. You passed, you listened, you could regurgitate the stuff or whatever. So, I think he lied about it. I think he lied about lying about it and it was a stupid lie because even if it was true it wouldn't wouldn't really work as a justification. And why am I bringing this up at the beginning? It's not just to throw shade at Jay.
It's just to show that like you know clearly you've got to be a utter sick fan to think uh differently to this, right? Jay sometimes says stuff that's not true. That's my point. He will on occasion at the very least sometimes say stuff that makes him look good that's strategically helpful to him even though it's not true. So he's got like an agenda. You've got to think to yourself that maybe sometimes if he's saying something especially if it's in a debate that you should question whether or not it's true. Is this guy is it right? Is it really true? Because I think once you read once the penny drops and you let that let that [ __ ] of armor go through and you think sometimes he does just bullshits, right? Like Frankfurt's definition of [ __ ] is saying something, you know, regardless of the the truth value of it, right? You're not really saying you're just not interested in whether it's true. You're doing it for a different reason. And clearly there he wasn't concerned with whether it was true or not. The purpose for him saying that he had a master's degree was to belittle Tump. And that's a dick move, right? It just is a dick move and I think it just calls into question like the character of the guy and like Jay if you listen to this you don't need to do that. You know you're an articulate intelligent person. You've got a big following. You don't have anything to feel ashamed about or insecure. Don't pretend to do something that you haven't done. Right? There you don't need to.
It's it's lame. So I think that that's that's poor, right? Poor behavior. And the second clip here, um, yeah, I'm just gonna play. This is I mean, admittedly, we're going from one dumpster to fire to another. We've gone from Jire talking to T Jump to the Piers Morgan show. And I don't know whether this is going up in the world or down, but let me just play this just a minute and a half or so.
Trying to play it anyway. [ __ ] sake.
>> Yeah. So earlier in the first section when we talked about Peterson, we were talking about what was good for men.
>> Yeah.
>> And whether Tate was good or Peterson was good. And now we're talking about ethics in the sexual domain, >> which there's no basis in their worldview for anything to be morally objectively right or wrong other than their personal preferences. So if there are if there's nothing objectively wrong, there's no reason why bigotry is wrong. Why is bigotry wrong?
>> Well, I support your claim. Don't run from your claim. Support it. Right. We have no You're saying we as atheists have no basis of morality. Support that.
>> Yeah. No epistemic basis for getting an ought from an is.
>> Yeah. That's a claim. Okay. Well, you're saying atheist, >> it's an argument. It's a famous argument.
>> You're saying that atheists can't count account for morality. So, what's the argument for that?
>> You can't get an offer is is the argument. Back to Hume.
>> Do you It looks like you don't know what an argument is. Come on. Reason. You have to go from one line of reasoning to another.
>> Do you know what an argument is? Get an ought from an is. You're an atheist. In a materialistic worldview, there's no >> atheism. What does that have to do with atheism?
>> In a materialistic atheistic worldview, there are no ought.
>> First of all, I'm not a materialist. You >> don't know the basic problem.
>> That's another claim.
>> That's just another claim. It's an argument. It's a famous historical. You don't know the difference between claim.
You can't defend it.
>> It's an argument. It's goes back to David Hume.
>> You don't know that. You don't know the difference between Look what just happened. Look what just happened. This guy said >> just what just happened is that you didn't know the difference between argument and why are you ever talking to me? Why are you scared? Let me talk.
Right. You just claimed that atheists don't have a foundation morality. I ask you to defend it. And then you said you can't get an offer from it is what the heck argument.
Right. You can't derive.
>> It's an argument. It's not a premise. It goes back to David H. You just didn't know that.
>> Okay. Can we >> All right. So I there's a couple of things to bring out in that. The the way that I mean, okay, it's not exactly great behavior on anybody's side there, right? It it's I picked a clip that's about half an hour into the discussion.
It starts off kind of relatively cordial, but it's break the cordiality breaks down not long into that. Danny's obviously already wound up by that point and is interrupting Jay, so fair enough.
Whatever. Uh the bit that really kind of like there's no need for Jay to do this kind of kind of impression bit in the middle. It's like it noisy. You're making noises. You're what's going on? I don't understand that. like it it it's it's guttural.
It's like the lowest common denominator behavior. It's just poor. Again, Jay, you're better than that. You don't need to do that. Why are you acting so so immaturely in a discussion, even if it is the Piers Morgan show? Um, and often Jay talks about, you know, masculinity and sort of guiding men and, you know, young impressionable men presumably who are watching his content, uh, talking about what it is to be masculine. And I guess this is in the eye of the beholder, but you know, to me, being confident in your own ideas and being respectful enough to listen to what someone else is saying, uh, even if you completely disagree with them, even if you hate that person, you can set a role model. You could be a role model with your public uh position. Um, and you could act like a like a grown-up. You could act like a man and uh with some honor and some dignity and doing this.
that stuff's not, you know, you act like a big baby as far as I that's how it comes across to me and um you don't need to do that. I don't know why you act like that. So, on one hand, it's just bad behavior again by by Jay. You know, this is a guy who does that type of behavior. I think it's um it's lame and disappointing. Uh, the other thing to say about it is, and I already did a video with Phil Halpo on Skydive Phil channel about this, but you know, he's he's trying to, you know, the other thing is that like, you know, he's rude, but also he says stuff that's not true to try and dominate somebody. And it's another example of this. I think maybe Dier once read or maybe he did some kind of he sat in a course that he never got examined on where they went through some David Hume or whatever. He's read something about it. Maybe he even read um David Hume himself. Um, but if he did, he seems to have forgotten exactly what the argument was about because Dier then, as you heard him, was saying, he seems to think that David Hume's idea is that if you're a materialist, right, if you're an atheist, then you're a materialist. And if you're a materialist, then there is no such thing as as a moral value because all there is is like material bumping into one another or something.
He thinks that's the lesson that Hume is teaching, right? That's the you can't get an from an is, right? that on materialism there's no no normativity and and that's just that's just a completely crap misreading. It's a lazy stereotypical misreading. Um Hume's argument as we go through and if you're curious about it go and look at the maybe I'll put a link to it in in the video description after I finish this.
Um but h we read out the crucial passage from humor. setting out the argument.
But Hume's idea was like sometimes you see like an argument given by anybody whether they're you know they weren't really atheists in those days but whether they were secular humanists or or religious people or whatever where they're saying blah blah blah this is the case this is the case this is the case and then all of a sudden uh this ought to be the case and he's saying well hold on a minute where did the ought come from right it's about where the prem like if you have an argument where the premises are all descriptive you're not going to get a conclusion which is normative that's That's Hume's idea. That's the is all problem. It's got nothing to do with materialism. It's all to do with the content of premises in an argument. And Jade, I I guess conveniently forgot that thinks that Hume, he thinks that Hume is making a point against the atheists or whatever as if only theists uh would have the ability to talk about morality. Come on. Come on, bro. You can do better than that.
you if you just read Hume it's not even difficult you know it's it's poor so what D does histick is to and he often talks about Hume he often talks about Kant he's got these like favorite people that he likes to go back to he rattles these potted histories of uh what he talks about empiricism he loves to bring up quine he rushes through all this stuff and he did this with me and you know I wasn't really prepared for it and it caught me off guard because I was trying I was struggling to be like what is guy talking about? Where's he going with all of this? You know, um he'd had, I guess, let's say, a lot of coffee before he'd come on the stream and he was talking very very quickly. Um as he often does. Uh and and and that's like a large part of of how of of how this guy argues. It's to it's a gish gallop.
Basically, it's a j gallop. He j gallops through these these contexts. But often what he's saying when you slow down and think about it, just play a little clip, pause it, and go through the details of what he's saying, is just hopelessly wrong, right? It's just bad. And I think he's a guy who's not very committed to being accurate about that type of stuff.
He doesn't really care if what he's saying is actually right as according to what Hume said. He's interested in hitting Danny over the head with the inquiries into human understanding or whatever Hume's book was called, right?
That's what he wants to do. It's a power move. He's just bit and that's what he this is I think part of his masculine man thing. He thinks that's what it is to be a man is to be a sort of aggressive like bullying person. Um and again I just think you know that doesn't that doesn't seem right to me at all. He should just be he should have the the courage to uh face the truth. What did Hume actually say? You know, maybe Hume's argument doesn't actually fit with with uh Dier's shtick, but I think it's cowardly to just pretend that what he said does and to to to publicly say it. And on the Piers Morgan show as well, I mean, most people watching that probably have no idea even who David Hume is.
So given that, I just going to play one or two more clips of D that are kind of just showing him getting stuff wrong before we go into what his argument is and we'll try and unpack what his uh like the details of his argument. So let's play this next one.
The whole system evidentialism and classical foundationalism is built on that the the belief that you can't do circular arguments. Right? So again, circular arguments are both valid and invalid in different cases and in different situations.
In first order natural language, first order logic, lower lower order logic, it's invalid to make circular arguments.
This is the basic mistake of T dump the other day.
But at a higher level, they're unavoidable. That's the point. And that's the point that the evidentialist doesn't understand.
So there D is saying that circular arguments are both valid and invalid depending on whether it's a lower order or higher order argument. But this is all all I'm all I want to bring to attention here on this one is that like I don't think that Jay Dy really knows what it what it validity is with a logical in the logical sense. Right? I think his grasp of logic is extremely shaky. He's a kind of guy who who learns about fallacies like straw man, begging the question, you know, appeal to authority, whatever. And he thinks that's what logic is. He doesn't distinguish logic and rhetoric, right?
He thinks logic is debating, right? He doesn't really distinguish between logic and epistemology, like justification in in epistemological sense, and like inferences, whatever. He he regularly runs those two concepts together. And now it's kind of funny when you think about it. a circular argument. I mean, there's there's at least two different ways of understanding what circular argument means or what it means to argue argue in a circle. Um, but the most straightforward way of thinking about it would be that you've got an argument, series of premises and a conclusion and like one of the premises is the conclusion or it's like smuggles in the conclusion. Say something like, you know, um, the Bible says that God exists um, so God exists, right? And maybe that smuggles in the conclusion because you think, well, the Bible was written by God or it's inspired by God and that's the only reason to think that, you know, the inference supports the conclusion.
But if so, then it just sort of it has the the the conclusion built into the premise. And in that sense, it's circular. But it's valid, right, in the logical sense because there's no way that the premises could be true and the conclusion is false, right? If if the conclusion is one of the premises, then there's no way that it could be true and the conclusion could be false. So a circular argument in that sense is trivially valid, right? But when Jay says it's not valid in some sense, but it's valid in another sense, what he means is something much looser, basically a non-defined term that he means something like acceptable, the sort of thing you can say in a debate.
um because he doesn't really know anything about formal logic. Um so that one I just thought was funny. You know, he's he's gonna if if you're a Jay Dyier fan and you're watching this and you think, "No, no, hold on. He's my champion. He's the logic guru and the the philosophy bro. He knows loads about philosophy. All these people, he's bested in debates. This guy's amazing at philosophy. Surely, how can this guy be saying he doesn't understand a basic notion in in logic?" But it's true. He doesn't I believe Jai doesn't know anything basically about logic and we can show a couple more clips about that.
Um let's do a couple on like his for his argument his basic argument is um oh no hold on we'll come to that in a moment let's do this one but I'm going to go ahead and say uh let's talk about uh higher order and lower order logic. So if we have normal propositions that are made like the tree is green whatever we can those kinds of statements then we move them to uh propositional logic right that's a higher order that's a step up so for example the tree is green is a lower order statement than x is y because now we're moving into a more higher formal type of statement Now the the disappointing thing here is that so there's a notion of order in logic right higher order logic is a thing first order logic is a thing and Jay definitely doesn't know what that what those terms mean in logic he's never picked up a book never been curious about it he talks about higher order logic meta logic meta epistemology all this stuff all the time I don't think he's ever once actually thought to himself do you know I better check what that means Maybe I'll read a book, a logic book.
Oh, I don't understand all these symbols. I better sit down and learn something that's hard in order to check this thing. Uh or or you know these days just ask chat GPT what does it mean in logic? Uh for higher order what is higher order logic, right? Because he he starts off by saying, "Oh, we have these like natural language statements like the grass is green or whatever."
And then he says, "And then we move up a level into propositional logic and that's higher order." No, it's not.
Propositional logic deals with those exact types of statements, propositions, you know, the clue is in the name, right? That's not even first order logic. That's baby logic. That's like the equivalent of arithmetic of like counting and adding and stuff like sort of thing you could teach in a school b propositional logic.
I mean they don't teach it in school.
They do teach it in philosophy courses.
Certainly I'd expect a master's degree course uh to to have to know what propositional logic is. That is that is a very very rudimentary issue. So if he doesn't know what propositional logic is, he doesn't know what validity is.
This is like basic. It's like not knowing what addition is and then claiming to be a mathematician, right?
Um, and then he's he talks about higher order logic, but what he's saying, the distinction he's actually drawing is between a proposition and then like the grass is green and then a version of that proposition where you've abstracted away from the content and put in like variables like all x's are y something like that, right? And he's calling that higher order, but that's not what legicians mean by higher order. That's just a bit more abstract, right? You've just taken the content away to reveal the logical form. You've used a variable like well done. That's not what higher order logic means, right? First order logic is where you have propositional logic and then you think you add more vocabulary, right? Things like quantifiers and then you think about semantics. The semantics of propositional logic is just truth truth values, right? But the semantics of first order logic is you have a domain of reference. The things that the quantifies range over and in first order logic quantifies range over objects of the domain. Right? second order logic.
What happens then is you have more you add more vocabulary to first order logic. Now you have quantifiers that range over sets of objects in the domain. Right? So you have basically you have predicates of predicates, right? So there's a very and then it keeps going.
There's just a hierarchy that keeps going ever more higher order logics. But you know there's a well there's just that's you know not I'm not making this up. Go and look go and look at the Stanford Encyclopedia article. If you don't believe me, go and ask chat GPT what's what does what's first order logic, what's higher order logic, and it'll tell you exactly that. Um, so I don't know why Jay uses the terms. Well, I guess he just doesn't know that they are terms in philosophy because he's just using he either doesn't care like he's a bullshitter in in the Frankfurt sense or he doesn't know. But there's, you know, it can't be that he does know and he's just using these terms in this wildly misleading way, right? So he's he either doesn't know or he doesn't care.
And I don't see how anyone could could reach a different conclusion. The only reason you wouldn't reach a different conclusion if you also didn't know or care.
So having established that he's often extremely badly behaved and terrible role model for people and doesn't definitely definitely says stuff that's wrong, often it seems to me lies or just doesn't know what he's talking about. Uh we'll move on. His favorite argument is the transcendental argument for God, which you know normally is associated with um Protestants and Calvinists like Van Hill or Bansson or whatever. He's an Orthodox. It's a bit different but you know so what we've seen that in the last couple of weeks. Um now when I spoke to him I tried to ask him what the form of the well he's you know when he's given you what's the form of the argument and this was a it's a typical thing. Van Hill was also accused of never really giving the argument properly, never committing to any premises and a conclusion. Um and and Jay also basically seems incapable of saying the argument in a straightforward manner. I asked him about it. You can go and watch um Skeptic Skeptical Agnostic I believe is the maybe I've got your the name of your channel wrong Stephen. I'm sorry if I Skeptic Agnostic or Skeptical Agnostic. I can't remember. Whatever. He has a wonderful video like an hour and a half going through Jay Dyier's I I'll put that in the description afterwards as well um explaining explaining this in in explaining in simple terms Jay Dyier's um approach to tag as well and he highlighted that in that discussion I I was going so sorry can you just say what the argument is like premises and conclusion and then Jay just meanders off down the history potted history of philosophy again and it's just like what where's this going um so regularly doesn't give it in a premise conclusion form and I think that's cuz he doesn't doesn't really get what's going on when someone asks him to do that but also sometimes he kind of like I think he kind of like gestures towards having a form of the argument um and we'll see I'm going to play a couple of clips of him trying to give the form of the argument and explaining why he's getting that wrong in different ways. So here we go. What's the form of the transcendental argument?
So here and if you go to the um Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy when they give uh the example of transcendental arguments this is the one that they always use uh it's the one I use in the debate you can go see that that we've constantly pointed this out father deacon Dr. an Isis paper that we often direct people to uh it just lays this out right because it's the most easy way through disjunctive form to see what a transcendental argument is.
So he says um x is a necessary condition for y therefore x. But that's just that that's just modus ponent. That's just saying if y then x y therefore x right.
So I don't know why he doesn't just say this is the most basic argument form that you find in logic in propositional logic in first order logic whatever.
It's like right the core. A lot of the time you see logic given in a textbook or whatever and it'll be axiatized and you'll have one rule of inference and you sort of derive the rest of them from that and it'll be modus ponent. Um, and I don't know why he doesn't just say that. But the thought is that he doesn't he doesn't realize that when he's saying that X is a necessary condition for Y, he's just saying if Y then X. That's what it means. That's what a necessary condition is in philosophy, in logic, in whatever. This is again, this is like the basic basic basic bit of content.
So, by having a big audience and being super confident and saying stuff like this, he's just misleading loads of people. It's like anti-education. He's just saying it wrong, not caring, never checking, say over and over again, right? He doesn't just say that once. It wasn't a careless slip of the tongue or something. Um, and also he calls it a disjunctive, but a disjunction is an is an or statement. It's like a or b.
That's a disjunction and an A and B that in a disjunction they're called disjuncts. So if you're saying something is disjunctive you're saying it has that form but but saying that X is a necessary condition for Y is saying it's an if then form. It's not an eitheror form. I mean like in a sense you can convert them if you want to but like that's just the wrong word. It's a conditional. It's not a disjunction. Um and I don't know why he doesn't know that. I kind of think that the reason is that in the FDA paper that we looked at last time and I think is the one that Dier is referring to there for some reason FDA gives three arguments and one of them is a disjunction and the other one is modus ponent and I don't think there was and I explained before they're not even logically equivalent because there are different systems where you'll have one but you won't have the other.
Um so I think he's just used the wrong word. But I think he's just heard the word disjunction, doesn't really know what it means, and just uses it without caring really what it means. But it's he's wildly misleading, right? Uh here's here's another version of that.
>> Okay. So the form of tag is if x then y, right?
>> No. No.
>> Okay.
>> The form of the argument is x is a necessary condition of y. Y therefore X >> and see it's how confidently the caller goes I've been listening to your stuff I think I know how this goes right let me just see if I'm with you form the argument is if X then why and JJ no no and then he just restates the same thing that he just shook his head and denied super confident never curious about whether or not maybe someone's maybe right and he's wrong just always dismissive in a kind of confident brolike manner um but you know all of people who know like the most basic stuff about philosophy or logic or whatever that is that's cringe that's really laughable one more on the form of tag I think >> is this like maybe some kind of IB or is this like a deductive argument to where if we say God doesn't exist there's like a contradiction or something >> no it's just a transcendental argument about the preconditions of logic the preconditions of knowledge at all so it's even more fundamental than that >> no I'm understanding that it's like a transcendental argument. Okay. But I'm asking what type of argu like you can have like an inductive abductive deductive kinds of arguments like what kind of argument is this one?
>> It's a disjunctive.
>> It's a disjunctive. X is a necessary condition of Y. Y therefore X.
>> A disjunctive. Did you say what do you mean disjunctive?
>> X is a necessary condition of Y. Y therefore X. That's the formal structure of what I'm arguing in the most simple formula.
>> Okay, that sounds deductive. I don't >> whatever, dude.
>> The guy says, "Well, that sounds like like it's deductive to me." And then Jay says, "Whatever." And then changes the subject, starts challenging him to bring his own argument. Also, I don't know why he's got his sunglasses on inside. Um, anyway, whatever. I guess we can park that. But you know there he's saying it's not abductive, deductive or inductive.
And then he goes and gives modus ponent which is like your poster most basic [ __ ] deductive argument. So it's like do you not know what inductive, deductive or abductive means either? And then he calls it you know disjunctive again. Oh it's just it's like um sideshow Bob stepping on the rake over and over again in that clip. It's just so bad. And yet this guy like is so patronizingly bro like about his like um you know his grasp on logic, his grasp on philosophy and but it's it's like it's cringe and it's also difficult to watch.
Uh the next clip I is we're going to we're going to pivot away to something a bit of a tangent this one, but I wanted to bring this one in. Um just to preface this, Jay said a few weeks ago that he was stopping doing debates on whether God existed. Um, and then I saw this video pop up which is him doing a debate on whether God exists. So again, either he was talked back into it or or what, I don't know. But he was certainly wrong about whether he was going to continue doing debates on whether God exists because he he carried on doing it. And the funny thing is you'll actually see in the bottom corner is there's an advert for him doing another debate for God's existence a few days after this. So he he's you know he's way back he's back back in the game now doing debates and stuff. Um, in a sense this is a throwaway comment, but it was um, and it's not really something that Jay talks about very much, but I wanted to bring this one in because um, I find it I think now we're gonna we're going to escalate the depth a bit and stop stop picking on him for just sort of saying the logic word wrong, which I guess is kind of um, trivial and whatever. Like I wouldn't I wouldn't I wouldn't pick on him so much for this type of stuff if he was like an good-hearted honest interlocutor given that he's such a dick. You know, at the beginning he was, you know, trying to um emasculate Te Tump by lying about having a degree that he didn't have and then he's, you know, on that Piers Morgan thing, he acts like like horrifically as well. Um, so you know, if you're going to be like that in public and also claim to be certainly act as if you're a very knowledgeable authoritative philosophy bro, then it's only fair enough if like you you don't know what validity means or what modus ponins is that you you know someone's going to call you out on that. And I think people have tried to to say this stuff. Pretty much nothing I've said so far is original, but um I just want to highlight it as well if I'm doing a J D video basically. Um but yeah here Jive talks about something about nature.
>> Abstract YT for five says what are your thoughts on nihilism?
>> You can answer first question.
>> I mean as a Christian obviously I'm not a nihilist. I I do appreciate aspects of say Nichi's philosophy and you know I think we can agree to some of those critiques of weaknesses within western civilization.
>> Really small clip right? a bit of a throwaway one. And um in a sense, you know, who cares if if he hears this view about nature, but it exemplifies one of the sorts of things that Jay does, which is to just like very quickly namerop somebody and say something about what they said, but say it in a vague way so that you're not really sure what he's actually saying. It's really difficult to pin him down exactly on what he's, you know, which bit of nature are you referring to exactly what are you saying? And n is kind of complicated, often misunderstood kind of um interesting philosopher in his own right, but like what are you saying exactly? So he said, "Well, I'm not a nihilist because I'm a Christian." But of course, sometime kind of sympathetic to some of the stuff that Nze said. Um, n is a well-known critic of Christianity. Um, so I was curious about this. I was think, you know what? I've heard this before. Where have I heard this sort of view before? And I thought, oh yeah, I know I've heard this before.
All of us, whether we know it or not, are still coping with that consequence.
Nze knew for example that one of the consequences of that there would be two consequences of the death of God and one would be the collapse of a system of meaning that encapsulated people psychologically and socially. The collapse of that system of meaning niche believed would bring about two events.
One would be the dawn of a universal nihilism, right? A sense of rootlessness and hopelessness that would pervade western culture and provide and and result in uh an intense and pervasive demoralization that and the dawn of the attraction of totalitarian ideologies that would rise to replace God.
>> Right. So, I'm I don't know if this is true at all, but I can definitely imagine that Jay's watched a bit of uh Jordan Peterson before. Um, and maybe he's watched some of these nature lectures after all. They're on YouTube and they're free, so maybe he has done.
Even if he hasn't, um, Peterson's hardly a reliable nature interpreter himself.
And, uh, maybe they're both getting this idea. It's kind of the generic uh, misunderstanding of what nature's idea was. Um, and it's basically something like that need that the idea this is like the the insane interpretation of historical figures from history just like we saw with David Hume there and how wrong Jay's idea was about what Hume was saying. I think the idea with this is it's supposed to be that nature says everything's going fine blah blah blah and all of a sudden God's dead. We don't believe in him anymore. And that ushers in a crisis that he calls nihilism. Now we don't have this like basically fine system of values anymore um because we don't believe in God. Now nihilism is on the stage, right? And as if like this is a kind of cozy Christian understanding of what Nch is talking about because the solution to that is is seemingly oh well we better all believe in God again because that's that's where we get rid of the nihilism go back to because he was saying as a as a Christian I'm not a nihilist but I'm sympathetic with some of the things that nature said right and you know I'm going to play a bit of um the YouTube channel the essentialists because this guy's a wonderful wonderful nature interpreter as far as I'm concerned and you can say this much better than I can. So let me just play this clip.
>> It's very funny because he presents nihilism as a consequence of the death of God. But the death of God in some sense is a consequence of nihilism.
Where does nihilism come from for Nietze? It's exactly what I described.
It's a religion that puts all the value for our lives in a world beyond in an other world and essentially says that uh you know this world it's it's a sin cursed world it's a fallen world it's all going to be burned away after the day of judgment anyway and all of your vain glory all of your pursuits of your desires for your own selfish ambitions or for uh aesthetic pleasures or even for your just even fulfilling your base impulsive desires that's all sinful Everything human beings do in some sense is sinful. We're originally sinful.
We're stained with sin. And Nietze uh says that this attitude in which the good life becomes impossible in this world and in which the true world is accessible only after death produces and then and then not only that but the aesthetic ideal that we already mentioned, right? that the whole starving of the impulses of the of the aesthetic as the ideal type.
This all leads us to that's what produces the crisis of nihilism.
Nihilism comes out of Christianity. It's not we lose Christianity and then therefore we have to confront nihilism because because our values have been questioned and and the only the only uh you know the only thing that was holding this all together was this this these certain axiomatic principles that we had and our values now that they've become questionable that's what produces the nihilism is oh nothing matters because Christianity turned out to be untrue.
No, that's I mean, yeah, I understand the argument, but that's not actually what Nichch is arguing is the very interesting thing. He's saying we part of why Christianity has to die is because it's created a nihilistic approach to life. He calls Christianity a kind of disguised nihilism.
Right? See, so I what I don't understand is that Jay's saying, well, yeah, I kind of sympathetic to some of Niche's critiques about Western civilization.
Sorry. The main essential thing that nature was arguing about was how Christianity, you know, re inverts the kind of will of uh people and it causes razant or whatever that breeds nihilism.
It Christianity is the cause of nihilism in the modern world. That's ne's central thesis. Which bit of that does Jay agree with, right? None of it. He just doesn't understand it because I doubt he's ever really made a genuine attempt to engage with what nature said. I think he's just happy to chuck around well tired, often repeated uh memes about what nature says. He doesn't actually know anything about that. Just like he's not interested in what uh David Hume actually said. He just says stuff about what David Hume says. Um so anyway, it's a tangent. It's not like Jay ever really riffs on nature, but it's just, you know, I could have picked a dozen different things. It was just that one in particular I found funny because it made me think of Peterson and and the essentialist uh critique on that.
So, I guess for the rest of the time, however long this is going to take, let's think about Jay's transcendental argument.
Um, and what I'm going to do is go through some things. I mean, maybe this isn't as organized as it could be, but at the end, I'm just going to play with without any clips or anything, just the first, say, 15 minutes or so of of um the best Jire video that I found. And I've listened to a ton over the last like month or so. I've been walking when I walk my dog, I put YouTube on and I and I subject myself to listening to Jay Dier uh sessions and there's so much of it. He's been doing YouTube for so long and there's all these clips channels that you can, you know, you can fully immerse yourself in Jire. And I I believe I found the best bit of Jay Dyier. And actually, it's um it's not him doing a debate. Um my view is that Jay Dire's at his worst when he's debating. He's actually a terrible debater would be my uh my view because because he doesn't have very good listening skills, right? He doesn't actually, as of the clips I've played, he's he's often just talking over the opponent. He's not really listening.
He's not thinking about what he doesn't give them any time to say what they want to say. Um, and yeah, he's he that makes him a bad a debater because it's there's not really much back and forth. It's often just him waiting to hear the keyword that triggers him into the thing that he wants to say. Anyway, and if if you want to hear the best of Jay Diet, what you should do is listen to the bits where he's talking to he's taking questions from members of his community or whatever on YouTube or whatever the platform is that he's streaming on and and just explaining himself without the pressure of being the big aggressive alpha bro whatever. And that's where you can really I think you cut out this the silly um the games and the kind of the silly the silliness stuff and you you kind of begin to get um an idea of what his um what his idea actually is.
And I think at the end I'll just I'll just sort of spend as long as necessary getting into the detail of that. Um and and I want to build up to that. Now I've played some clips. I have more clips and and maybe if it's fun uh later on we can do some more of them. Um we didn't we didn't look at the trivial list one yet that's funny. Um there's there's a couple of others so we if if needs be we can look at them but um let's just let's just think about what's going on with with Jay D. So the basic idea is he's trying to say something like it it the general idea is that there's some critique of normally empiricists/materialists runs those two things together. He references David Dum a lot and he thinks about it as this kind of like malaise of modernity that these days uh modern philosophy doesn't do metaphysics anymore. Not like back in the old days when they did metaphysics properly. Uh nowadays it's just um it's all kind of epistemology and it's it's like um sort of rootless and and doesn't it can't escape this kind of empiricist kind of straight jacket that it's stuck in. Um what that what he thinks it's doing is it's leaving uh the practitioner of of this empiricis of atheism stuck in a shallow superficial understanding of the world. And um what what he's trying to encourage them to do is to see that actually a lot of the things that they want to say like you know science works and it allows us to know about the world or whatever um only that those types of things are not really expressable if from that vantage point of um of empiricism or materialism or whatever.
and um that in fact not just that that worldview is impoverished but that the person trying to put that forwards is themselves in fact committed to a much broader wider picture that goes beyond empiricism. Um so this is where presuppositionalism comes in. So he thinks that the person who wants to say something like um the Bible is false or something like that that they can't just make that type of criticism from the vantage point of empiricism uh because that doesn't allow them to say that the self exists or that like you know there are causal relations or that the future will be like the past or space and time blah blah blah blah blah. These things are all not empirically verifiable.
That's Jay's idea. And um the the empiricist is sort of presupposing those while at the same time if you ask him whether they that he can actually know that those things exist he'll say that he can't know that those exist but he's presupposing that they do exist even when he's denying that he can know that they exist. And that's the kind of central tension that Jay wants to bring out in his interlocutor and say that that's the kind of that's what defeats their worldviews the way he would put it or it makes knowledge impossible from their point of view. Um, and it's a clash between their presuppositions and the things that they say out loud or the kind of epistemology that they espouse explicitly. Um, and we'll see later on when we play the the clip of Jay where he's being calm and and articulate that he he lays it out in terms of like level I think it's level two he calls it, which is basically he he often talks about the reports of sense data, the types of scientific claims. And then level one is like these transcendental objects the sort of things I was just talking about the self and you know causality that type of thing and then level zero is like god at the top. So he's saying that you have to have these scientific statements you have to presuppose these transcendental things but then the transcendental things themselves you have to presuppose that god exists. Now the way I see it is that the transition from this sort of surface level empiricist statements to the background like objects of knowledge that Jay thinks we're all presupposing the method there that Jay wants to use is the trans he's calling it this transcendental method. Um and often he says he'll refer to it being that like it diff you know makes knowledge impossible for that person. um or that they they by trying to deny it, they're in fact presupposing it. Um, and that method is a bit wishy-washy and I'm going to try and unpick some problems with like what exactly it is his method is supposed to be there and how how are we supposed to understand what that is and then I think that you know the the movement from the transcendental objects to God it can't be the same or however you cash out what the method is supposed to be from the kind of empirical to the transcendental from the transcendental to the divine can't be the same type of method and it's I think at that point it really is just an inference to the best explanation. And the caller on that previous clip who said, "Isn't this just an IBE?" Jay should say, "Yeah, it is at that point cuz it's it's very implausible that the transcendental method that he's talking about that goes from the empirical to the transcendental could really ever take you from the transcendental to the divine. It just seems like that." And I'll explain that more, but I I really do think that that's not going to work. So there's there's a couple of like historical candidates for what the method is that he's invoking because he's using the term transcendental and typically when you say that word in philosophy most people will think that you're talking about something to do with Kant and that's because Emanuel Kant basically coined the term and uses it in the critique of pure reason. Um and so I'll talk about that in a moment.
Yeah, actually maybe I'll talk about that now. So I think that like um if if Jay says he's you know he'll say stuff like oh K has some good good ideas couple of good points that K made but I disagree with them and his I think the idea is supposed to be there something like a general endorsement of the methodology but there's a rejection of the kind of uh conceptual nature of where K's project leaves him. Right. So, um, the general thumbnail sketch, I don't want to do a potted history, but you kind of have to a little bit when you're rehearsing what Jay says, is that, you know, Hume comes along and says something like I'm already doing. Hume comes along and said, Hume's idea is something like, you know, if you're a strict empiricist about stuff, then you shouldn't like, you know, his analysis of causation can't really see the causes, right? can see, you know, that this billyard ball and then that billyard ball moving or whatever, but like where's this thing you call a cause, right? I just see stuff moving about. Causes the types of things that rationalists were um postulating uh necessary connections between events or whatever. He says it's kind of hidden behind the the sensations and they may not be there. Maybe they're there, maybe they're not. But from the point of view of like empiricism, best you can do is uh something else. He so his analysis of causation is something like you just become habituated to expect that when stuff of this type happens stuff of that type follows. So Hume's got this kind of reductive account of what causation is.
And it's basically just what you could have if only you you're staying strict to your empiricism and not postulating stuff that you can't really detect empirically yourself. um or his analysis of of morality is is is rooted in the kind of um what is it? Your your desires and and your emotions and and stuff like that. So, so again, it's something you've got access to and it's like a reductive account. You're not postulating like moral values existing out there in the world. You you tell some other type of story about it.
That's okay for an empiricist. Um, but it's kind of a threat if you think that there are uh well, if if you if you want to be able to do science and like talk about things in the objective world out there beyond your senses or whatever, um you might feel threatened by Hume's empiricism. And this is kind of K's um Kickstarter. He's trying to respond to Hume in some sense, right? This typical story. And he wants to say that there's um uh synthetic a priori knowledge, right? something I can know with my mind for certain, but it's also not just a kind of trivial definitional thing. It's something about something that's real that actually exists, right? Uh synthetic, not just analytic.
Um so then K has these like transcendental deduction, right? And the way it works is it's kind of like and this is very quick and I'm not a can scholar. So like um take this with a with a pinch of salt. This is the sort of thing you never hear Jay say is I'm not a such and such scholar. he comes across super confident by everything that he says, right? But my understanding of it um is it works like this. You say you start off by by seeing well I've got these sensations, right? Like sensation of color over here and a temperature over there and like a whatever these bare sense data. So Jay's favorite phrase. Um and you know this kind of cartesian skeptic will be like on your shoulder going well maybe that's all there is right? How do you know that there's a real world behind that that sense data?
Maybe you're just the the only thing that exists. Um, and as I see it, the transcendental part of the transcendental method is to to start from premises that the skeptic will agree to. So, Kant says something about how well it's not just sensations, right? You've got an experience that's unified, that's like coherent. It's not just, you know, brown and circle and, you know, shiny and cold, whatever. Just like random and jumbled up or something.
They kind of are part of a network that's that's connected together that presents things to you. Brown dog, right? Open window, cold air, stuff like this. It like um it's all mushed together in in a synthesized kind of coherent hole.
And for that to be the and so like you know the skeptic is going to agree yeah okay well I'm saying that you've got this idea it's not just like brown and circle and whatever it's a dog and you know guitar and stuff but maybe there's nothing behind that that's the kind of carteesian worry but K thinks well if you'll allow me the the notion that the the s of bare sensations must be synthesized together into a unified hole then K's next move is to say well there something must be synthesizing them right there must be some activity of the mind that's like stitching together this the bare inputs of sense data and turning them into concepts and ideas that you can understand and like experiences, meaningful um things, right? The intelligibility of experience. Um well, how what's doing the job of synthesizing the experiences together of stitching it together? It can only be some kind of me mental faculty that's doing that that's driving it. And K thinks of the mental faculty as a kind of faculty of the understanding. Um what's that? Well, he says it's kind of must be these kind of like basically what he calls logical functions, right? The brain operating in a kind of broadly logical way, stitching these things together a bit like a machine. Um, and what does that mean?
Well, for Kant, Kant has this kind of um stepping on a rake moment in the beginning of the critique where he says that uh logic was completed by Aristotle, right? It's taken not one step forwards and not one step back since days of Aristotle. Um and it's really unfortunate because can sort of just before the advent of the kind of big revolution in logic where that all changed and people now realize that can uh that um logic wasn't completed by Aristotle at all. Um but basically Kant thinks oh here's logic I know what logic is picks up you know prior analytics or whatever and and and reads Aristotle and goes is the basic form of a proposition is you know subject predicate form you know all A's are B something like that right um it basically just superimposes the cantian uh the Arisilian logical system and thinks that must be the basic machinery that the brain is using the mind is using to stitch together sense data to turn into coherent uh rational thought and then it's like another bit of a waffly bit of a handwavy jump to then say now we've got these aristoilian categories right the the categories that Jay loves to talk about from uh metaphysics um but obviously when K's talking about them he thinks that they're like being imposed by the mind so they're like conceptual things they're basically the same sisting categories but they're like not out there in the world They're like parts of my mind. Right now, why am I taking this detour into explaining what Kant's talking about? Well, it's to suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's not just that like Jay can agree with a bit of this methodology and then reject that right at the end it somehow pops out at the other end that K makes a mistake and and then somehow just concluding that that this is all conceptual. It's conceptual from the beginning, right? It's it's a it's a fundamentally conceptual project. It's about cons about how you have how your sensations are stitched together. How is that how is it possible for my sensations to be coherent? That's Kant's project. And he gets to it by going up from the sensations so so far and then down from the areting categories. And he meets in the middle. And that's that's how that's what you know you probably all heard that K's idea is that you impose the forms of intuition on on your sensation. But that's that's what's going on. is marrying these two things together.
So it can't be that Jay's using this method.
Why is that? It's for one thing is a Jay regularly dismisses K's conceptual the conceptual aspect of of the um of K's transcendental method. But it's also that like if you think about it, Jay's trying I mean here's a distinction for you, right? The difference between a modest transcendental argument and an ambitious transcendental argument, right? A modest transcendental argument will be saying for for for X to be the case whatever that is let's say for my experience to be coherent then Y must be the case right what's why in this circumstance well for for K the why uh is something like my mind must work in a certain way right so the conclusion of K's argument is that um for me to have intelligible experience something about my mind must be the case right so it's something internal you start with and the conclusion is something internal as An ambitious ontolo transcendental argument starts with the same beginning for me to have intelligible experience.
But then something must be the case. But the thing that must be the case isn't something in my mind. It's something outside my mind in the world, right?
That God exists or that you know the future really will resemble the past or that the self actually does exist or that you know space and time actually exists. So Jay's doing an ambitious transcendental argument. wants to show the transcendental objects are actually there in the world that when we you know when we pres we have to presuppose them and they're really there not that I have to presuppose them but that might just be a con construct of my mind a constraint of my mind he think he's doing an ambitious ontological argument uh transcendental argument so it can't be that what Jay's doing is anything like what can Kant's doing he can use the word transcendental and he uses unlike can as far as I remember the word presuppose or presupposition. Um but that's basically it. It's got nothing else to do with what K's doing. So you can sort of like well obviously there must be some relation to what Kant's doing. Um Jay assues K in some respects but he doesn't it seems to me he doesn't really understand how radically what he's saying departs from what K must be saying. Um so I think this is another occasion where Jay doesn't can't be using what K's method is. Now if it's not can the other kind of typical thing you hear in in this uh in these circles let's say I mean in modern day you you you'll think of someone like like Strawson but I never hear Jay talking about Strawson. What Jay will often say and I'll play a clip about this in a minute is he'll reference Aristotle because and this because Aristotle me well has has some kind of argument in the metaphysics book four of the metaphysics where he talks about the law of non-contradiction. We've talked about this on the channel before and we've had Graeme Priest on the channel talk to us about it as well. Um but there supposedly there's this transcendental argument in Aristotle right and Jay actually references yeah this is the type of argument that I'm doing and now when I spoke to Jay one of the I think pretty much the only interesting bit of it for me was when we talked about this where you know I I've spent quite a lot of time reading quite a lot of the secondary literature on this I'm someone who's who tends towards becoming obsessed with things every now and again as you may have noticed and that was one of the things I became obsessed and I read, you know, the ar the crucial bits of Aristotle and a bunch of the secondary literature and found my way into, you know, we talked about Yukavich and Graeme Priest's uh critiques on them, which is where I where I land um on it these days. So, for me, it was it was a fun opportunity to talk about something that I've spent ages thinking about and reading about in the past. and it's very obscure and it's not the sort of thing you can easily um find people who want to talk about it with you that much. But um I also I do understand that like a lot of people think that it was disappointing because we got sidetracked into just talking about Aristotle instead of about tag.
But actually it seems to me that it's quite crucial to tag because um you know it if it's not can that we're talking about if what Jay's doing isn't can transcendental arguments what exactly is it that he's doing? And the only other thing that seems plausible, the thing that he references is um is Aristotle.
And it's like it's a fun combination of like that must be what he's got in mind.
But also it's really easy to show how bad that argument is. So I'm going to do both of those things. Now let's play a bit of so here's Jay talking in after the our debate where he references what I was saying. So I was I was bringing up there's a controversy in reading Aristotle's passage. There's a sequence of passages in that bit of the metaphysics, the long the long argument and a bunch of short ones that come after it. And commentators um modern commentators, the ones who are actually critical about Aristotle are um are stuck really because it's kind of like a riddle about how you understand it, right? Because Aristotle says at the beginning when it comes to the law of non-contradiction, you can't give a direct argument to show that the law of non-contradiction is true. you have to give an indirect argument, right? What's an indirect argument? You know, where did that come from? Um, so it's not clear what an indirect argument is, but then what he goes on to give if like one way of reading it just obviously it's a direct argument, right? It basically just becomes modus ponins or modus tolins possibly. But if that's what you know, how could it be that he's on the one hand saying it's not a direct argument but then giving an obviously direct argument for it, right? So there's this kind of riddle of understanding what's going on there. But then also if you think oh well [ __ ] it, who cares? It just is that that is what his argument is. Then on the next level, if you think about like well what is the argument any good? No, it seems like a terrible argument. That's a really like straightforward critique of what like if that is what he's saying, it can't be right, can it? Can't be a good argument because if it was that then here's the problem, right? So we'll go into that in a minute. But then that's just to set up the context is I was saying you know there's this exegetical and interpretational um controversy about that bit of Aristotle. So, it can't be that you're just saying, "Yeah, yeah, that's what I think is this basic reading of of Aristotle, completely unaware of the controversy around it." Um, but I think Jay didn't have any awareness of being any controversy.
Anyway, so he's had some time to think about it by the time I play this next clip. And he's got something he wants to say back. Um, and oh, actually, I wonder if I've got seem to be missing clip 10. Oh, that's annoying. Let me just see if I can No, I knew there'd be something wrong here.
Just give me two seconds. I'm going to just grab clip 10.
If I can find it.
Talk amongst yourselves.
Um, god damn. I thought was a I was on a roll for a moment.
No balls.
I might just have to get the video up.
Can't find the clip.
Oh, and actually, let me whilst I'm doing this, let me just say it was really helpful that loads of people responded to my post by giving me ideas of things to um use in this video because um a lot of that was very very useful for me and that's where I got some of these clips from. And uh this is one of them. I'd completely forgotten about this, but somebody posted, and I'll be able to see who it was in just a second, um, to remind me of this bit where they said, "Oh, do you remember when Jay responded to your comments on Aristotle?"
Um, and so That was uh I'm trying to I hate why these YouTube names are always so difficult to pronounce when you say Alejandro Cvetto 2206. I hope I've said that correctly.
Um so I'm watching it on my nonpremium account. Let's get through this advert.
Non-s skippable YouTube adverts unacceptable.
And last one. [ __ ] sake.
Right. [ __ ] hell. That was annoying.
Let me share my screen. Um, okay. Here is I think it starts maybe a minute before that.
>> I don't want people to get the wrong impression that for example if you're making a transcendental argument that you're stuck in some sort of a priori world idealist idealism because that's not at all what it is because actually a big part of >> the transcendental argument being holistic it requires uh experience of this world. It necessitates, it assumes experience of this world, namely the world that we inhabit, not some other theoretical one or whatever like JF was thinking, but but it assumes this world and it assumes, you know, categories that are applicable to the here and the now. That's another misunderstanding that people have because a lot of times people hear the argument, they hear what we're talking about. Um, some of the atheists that I've argued and they're like, "Oh, well, you're just talking about like K transinal idealism and that doesn't have anything to do with the here and the now." And that's not actually true because transcendental arguments have a life of their own outside of um Kant. Uh they they've had a life outside of that and and they're they're just a different type of reasoning and logic.
They're not invalid, but they're different. And that's what I think trips a lot of people up. But we're not yet I'm sorry. We're not too transcendental arguments. Okay. So So basically with the classical foundationalist tradition, what we're doing is we're starting with those kind of self-evident maxims. And I think it's >> appropriate to say that Would you agree that because a lot of the ancient world didn't think in terms of meta level questions, I'm not talking about generically the idea of metaphysics, but meta logic, metaeththics, meta mathematics, um questions about language that would only say pop up after bothenal argument statement from the found of knowledge where I believe and I think that if got to hear the debate that I did with Dr. Malpass who who works in epistemology as well. He was >> I don't actually work in epistemology.
So I work in metaphysics but never mind >> was making the case that that nobody really thought that that Aristotle was making a transcendental kind of argument in metaphysics book 7. But I think that that uh >> metaphysics book four never mind.
>> The fact that John Damascus in the fountain is relying on Aristotle so heavily in that book. The fact that he begins the book with that transcendental argument about how philosophy assumes a worldview and assumes logic and if you were to be a sophist and deny it that's the argument that Aristotle gives against the sophist. So um point being is that I think Dr. Malpest was wrong to say that um it's not a transalent argument and nobody after um Aristotle in the ancient world thought that it was because I don't think he's read John of Damascus but uh what would you say to somebody who says for example well these argument >> all right that's probably enough of that bit of Jay it's just enough to show that like um I mean I there's controversy about like the form of Aristotle's argument and I don't I wasn't saying that people in the ancient world were aware or really going through that um very much because in the ancient and medieval periods people are not very critical of Aristotle. They like reading Aristotle but they're not like applying academic critical methods to it very much. They kind of just rever Aristotle. Um uh so yeah, okay, fine. I'm not really interested in that. I'm talking about like the modern modern day scholarship on that part of Aristotle. 20th century and onwards kind of scholarship on that.
And um if there's contro controversy about whether or not we should classify what Aristotle was doing as a transcendental argument, that question doesn't even make sense before Kant because K's the person who comes up with that method and then there's this question of h was Aristotle actually anticipating what Kant did. But there's no way John of Damascus could have weighed in on that question because he's like whatever 8th century or whatever it is that he, you know, I don't exactly sixth century something like that.
Anyway, whatever he's like a thousand years before Kant. So there's no way that he could possibly have known or been able to weigh in on the question of whether or not Aristotle's methodology was the same as K's, right? Um but anyway I I went and had a look at the font of knowledge and there is no discussion of um Aristotle Bull's argument in in metaphysics 4 there at all there there is I think what Jay's talking about there's an argument that looks like it's like Aristotle's argument in protracticus which is um a lost book of Aristotle where he's trying where apparently what's going on there is Aristotle's trying to give an argument for why you should do philosophy. And then the argument is something like if you think that you shouldn't do philosophy, then um you've got to have some like reasons for why not. And at that point, you're basically doing philosophy. So that means that you don't think that you shouldn't do philosophy because you're already doing it. Um may is that a transcendental argument? I mean, maybe sort of. It's kind of um there's something kind of like sort of self-referential or something about that. It looks like it's something to do with pro presuppositions maybe. Um, but that's that's basically the argument that John of Damascus gives. It's got nothing to do with the law of non-contradiction. Um, the way Jade describes it is something like that John of Damascus says, "Well, you've got to have a worldview in order to do philosophy or whatever." That's completely not right at all. I mean, you should think one of his own petristic fathers arguments right. Um, so, you know, prove me wrong. Show me in the comments if John of Damascus gives an analysis of metaphysics book 4 or says anything about transcendental arguments or gives says anything about the law of non-contradiction. What he does is broadly speaking just repeat like they all did in those days stuff from Aristotle. Uh so he talks he just basically regurgitates Aristotilian logic and and metaphysics but he's not engaging with it critically and he's not doing anything apart from maybe that bit of the argument where it could sort of maybe be thought of as transcendental method. There's nothing else there. So, so Jay's again is like hazy misremembering of what somebody else said, but he he did slip into one of the things he often says which is about like a oh this was Aristotle's argument when he was arguing with the sophists right so Jay can sort of remember that in the metaphysics um he sort of you know characteristically Aristotle like portrays the people he's arguing against in like really unflattering and non-charitable ways right and so he's he picked He he characterizes other people as like Heracleitans for instance as being committed to the the contradictions all the time because everything is in flux or whatever whether they really were as committed to that doctrine as he says they were whatever who knows but um he he seems to remember Aristotle arguing with the sophists as if they were saying uh I I don't I don't remember it being that this the sophists were saying something about contradictions being true. I thought it was the Heracitans but whatever. um his idea is that uh yeah he he has this little monologue about it but here he leans on his friend um FDA to um unpack that a bit and I thought actually FDA says it in this bit better than Jade did. And I've actually got this clip. So let me just play this bit.
>> I'd say that absolutely is a species of the transcendental argument. So for example, you could use this um the three basic fundamental laws of thought. The law of identity, the law of exclude the middle and the law of non-contradiction.
Um what Aristotle is saying is that these fundamental laws are assumed in doing anything. It's assumed in making arguments. It's assumed in language. It's assumed for meaning. And in order for you to deny that the three fundamental laws of thought exist, guess what? You have to assume them. So for example, what laws are you referring to?
By the three fundamental laws, do you mean the three fundamental laws of thought? Oh, check. Um, you'd assume the law of identity. And by the three fundamental laws of thought, it's either the three fundamental laws of thought or it isn't. Yes. Then you've got law of exclude the middle. So it couldn't be that we're in this conversation talking about the three fundamental laws of thought and not the three fundamental laws of thought at the same time and in the same way. Yes. Then again you've shown that you've uh assumed the law of non-contradiction. So in other words in order to deny that you have to assume it to deny it which is self stoaltifying.
Um, and for those of you who don't know, the Latins will know this, but uh, stoifying from the Latin stois, stupid.
You made yourself stupid, right? By contradicting yourself. Um, that is a transcendental argument. And that's exactly the sort of argument that we would make too is that >> in order to deny the existence of God, you have to use your presupposing it whether you consciously recognize that or not as a foundation to deny it in the exact same way as you point out Jay. Um that Aristotle illustrates um >> and therefore it's a trans it's a type of transitional argument.
>> Right. Right.
So there very clearly you can see that they both nod along and oh yes that's right definitely where FDA says this is exactly the sort of argument that we would use to show that God exists um and that you know who cares whether we call it a transcendental argument or not but that is the type of argument they both say yes definitely that's what we would say we would argue in the same way that Aristotle would um and what the argument is supposed to be obviously is as he said if you say anything at all that that will presuppose the law of non-contradiction or that the laws of logic are true. Um, but it's just that like it's it's really like they don't ever sit there and one and never read anyone critical of that view or seemingly ever like ask themselves like critique their own ideas. Is this really good? Is it actually a good argument or have I just heard it before and I'm just saying it? Um, because like okay, here's a standard way of of like undermining this. Suppose you do find somebody who's uh doesn't who's claiming that the law of non-contradiction isn't true, right? They're going to fall into two groups, right? They're either going to be a dialtheist or they're going to be a trivialist. This is why trivialism should be interesting to Jane and seemingly never heard of it before. Um, actually, I had a funny clip of that, but I'm not sure I uploaded it in time.
Anyway, whatever. from the trivialism from the video on trivialism, right?
Where the guy phones in, starts running some stuff about trivialism and Jay says, "Oh, I've heard of this before."
Yeah, definitely. And then a few minutes later, the guy says, "Do you actually know what trivialism is?" And Jay goes, "No, I don't know what it is." Right?
Which is kind of a shame because if you're going to run Aristotle's argument, you should know what trivialism is, right? For this reason.
So someone who comes along and challenges you, I think the law of non-contradiction is false. They're going to fall into one of two groups.
Either they're going to be a trivialist or they're going to be a dialtheist.
What does that mean? Right? The difference is just if you're a dialtheist, you think some contradiction is true, but not all contradictions are true, right? Some, but not all. Whereas the trivialist thinks that all contradictions are true. The trivialist thinks that every proposition is true, which just then means every prop every contradiction is true as well, right?
Because that's just a subset of all of the propositions. But the dialtheist is going to say something is contradictory, but not everything. Um so they might say something like you know Graham priest is a good example of this type of person or um you might find examples from history too. I mean priest thinks Hegel was a dileist in some sense uh or Narajuna was a was a dialtheist whatever you but you find people sometimes entertaining this sort of heretical seeming notion that there might be contradictions kind of edges of reality or whatever and you might but you might think that um within the concept of nothingness is contradictory or the concept of being is contradictory or something like that uh or you know straightforward example you might think that the the liar paradox is an example example of a true uh contradiction. Now, if you do think that there's something like that, you better not also think that from a contradiction anything follows because that just leads you straight into trivialism, right? So, if you want to not be a trivialist but but still think that some proposition is contradictory. What you have to do is deny that that that everything follows from it. Okay? So, you need to adopt what's called paracconsistency.
That's just the definition of paracist.
You think there's some uh you just think that it's not the case that from a contradiction everything follows.
So okay that's the distinction between dytheist and a and a trivialist right but now how does this Aristotle's argument works so so imagine we run the sort of thing that that FDA was just saying then that if they if they say I think that the liar paradox is a true contradiction he's going to say do you think that the lie paradox is a true contradiction and it's not also case that the lie paradox isn't a true contradiction and a dialtheist is probably going to say yeah I think I think that the statement that the liar paradox is a true contradiction isn't itself a contradiction. It's just that the liar paradox is true and false. My statement that it's true or false is is consistent.
So is so they're not presupposing the law of non-contradiction. They're saying a consistent sentence, but they can do that even though they think there's some true contradictions. So strictly speaking they think the law that says there's no contradictions is false because there's an exception to it. So they're not presupposing that the law of non-contradictions just saying something consistent doesn't mean that you think that the law that says everything is consistent is true. Right? If I if I bump into someone and they're French, that doesn't mean I think everybody is French. Right? I can think this guy is French even though not everyone is French. Right? can say this sentence is is consistent even if I think not every sentence is consistent. So it's just blatant non secretary to say I've got this person to commit to something being consistent therefore they're presupposing the law of non-contradiction. No, they're not. The dialtheist is well within his rights to say I'm not presupposing the law of non-contradiction. You haven't shown that just by getting me to commit to something being consistent.
So it obviously doesn't work against a dial. It's a terrible argument if you really did have like the sophist in Jay's imagination who's who's um acting like a dialtheist. He's well within their rights not to be moved by Aristotle's argument. What about the the trivialist? Well, trivialist just agrees with everything you say. So you say, do you agree trivialism is true and not false? Yeah. Do you agree that it's both true and false? Yeah. Whatever you say to them, they're going to agree with. So you know have you actually can you even win an argument against them? Is there any sense in which you can you know they'll concede immediately that what they've said is contradictory. They'll concede to anything you ask them. Right?
So um I don't I think that they just like escape the net of rationality whatsoever. Like there's no winning an argument against them. There's no proving a point against them. They concede everything you want to say immediately if you just ask them to. So can you have a good argument that really shows anything against a trivialist? I just don't think you can. But who cares?
Nobody's a trivialist anyway. Um but Jay should understand the difference between a trivialist and a dialtheist. A dytheist at least is a you know position that someone might have in philosophy.
Um certainly since the sort of second half of the 20th century where there's understanding of how paracistant logic works. So, it's just sort of like lame and cringe and out of date and bad philosophy to think that, you know, Aristotle if what Aristotle was doing is just sneakily getting your opponent to commit to something being true and not false and then saying, "Well, haha, you must be committed to the law of non-contradiction as consequence."
That's just a terrible, terrible argument and nobody should make it.
So, if that can't be what Kant's saying, this can't be what is what Jay's up to.
if what he's up to, like they seem to be saying emphatically on that argument is on that video is that they're doing what Aristotle does. Well, there's a terrible argument and what they're doing is a terrible argument then if if it's modeling what Aristotle was doing.
But like the point the sort of wider point is that you can say to somebody, you know, you say X that presupposes Y, but that doesn't mean that it does, right? You actually have to do some more work to show that it actually does. and Aristotle's arguments fail to establish that. So it is possible to make the claim X presupposes Y try and give an argument that supports that and it not work. Right? Aristotle was blatantly blatantly fails. It's a terrible argument.
Jay and FDA seemingly don't understand that. Can't can't tell. I guess don't know anything about the kind of standard dialtheist objection to that. never read Yukavich's book and never read anything by Graeme Priest or all the other uh people who've done work on uh dialtheism and paracency.
So that just leads me as a preamble really to think well what is how is it that Jay's arguing for what he's arguing for and it seems to me that the um the methodology is unclear. Now, let's play a bit of what I think is the best Jay D video where we can see him explaining it in his own terms without the bravado or whatever, without FDA coming in and saying it in his way. So, I'm going to play this video um I'll put in the description as well. I'm just going to start playing it. Unlike a clip, this I've just downloaded the whole video.
So, it's him not talking to a I guess it's a caller in a sense, but it's like not an antagonistic atheist debate me bro kind of situation. And it's like it's almost like um I could imagine it being a sort of Patreon only guest thing.
Is it going to play?
God damn it. Why aren't you playing, [ __ ] Okay.
Okay.
>> Uh phenomenal observation or whatever is the common way that we're usually speaking about facts or um phenomena in the world.
And the thing about these types of things is that in this domain, we're typically not uh involved in circularity, right? So if we were in a courtroom setting, this is where the courtroom setting would fail, right?
Because if we were in a courtroom setting and we were saying, you know, we were argu arguing, uh, did Bill Cosby, uh, you know, does he live next door to me, right? Uh, and then we go and we check and we find out, no, in fact, Bill Cosby did not live next door to me and in fact that it was Eddie Murphy. You thought that I was going to say Lil Wayne because of my dumb analogy, but no, it was in fact Eddie Murphy. Now, if I'm wrong about that uh empirical sense, data fact, does that destroy my worldview?
Hello.
>> No, it doesn't.
>> Right. So, it's just kind of like a uh it's a uh a thing that I could be wrong about that doesn't significantly alter my perception of reality, my ethics, right? It's it's in this domain of what we could call level two types of things.
Now, in this domain up here of level one, I'm just making this up on the spot as as a illustration. This is where we're raising the bar, right? We're going to say no those are one types of uh or a class of statements about things that can be wrong. What about reasoning about reasoning itself? And so these are metal logical questions, metaethical questions, metaphysical questions.
When I start to ask questions in that domain and I ask questions about reasoning itself or words themselves, how do we know words have meaning? How do we know logic is logical?
You see, these are questions that you can't actually be wrong about because if you're wrong about that domain, it really destroys the possibility of knowledge, right? So things like transcendental categories, things like fundamental presuppositions kind of go in this domain of what we're going to call level one, right? And the level one is what undergurs things in level two.
So we'll say we'll put things like categories like Aristotle's categories or uh presuppositional presuppositions um not any presupposition but presuppositions about the possibility of knowledge. Uh so this would be you know space, time, objective reality, uh objective um principles, uh logic, numbers, abstract entities, um the future resembling the past, induction, uh identity over time, all these kinds of things that we call presuppositional categories. Um that words have meaning. That's an easy one to do.
or that logic is logical, right? I mean, in other words, doesn't speaking, doesn't it kind of presuppose that words have meaning? Sure. So, but how do we know words have meaning? Well, can you demonstrate that without using words? No. So, it's circular. It's an unavoidable circularity. So the thing with the categories, the presuppositions or something like words have meaning.
There's no way to argue or demonstrate or show that the things in level one that undergur level two, right, that they're true without circularity.
It's impossible. There's no way to demonstrate logical categories, categories of being, metaphysics, the presuppositions of, you know, things that I mentioned earlier, or that words have meaning without in some way being circular or referencing the thing that you're trying to prove. It's just impossible. Right? Again, how do we know logic is logical?
Well, there's no way to argue about that or speak about that without assuming logic and principles of logic. So, that's the type of circularity that we're talking about. Now, typically in the domain of debate, uh most people, especially atheists, they don't really think in these two levels. They they they think everything is like this.
Literally, everything up here is also just in this category. And they don't understand that presuppositional argumentation or thought is is unique and different because it shows that these things on the top in level one, they're actually preconditions for the possibility of knowledge. Okay? So they're not just knowledge claims.
They're things that are necessary to have knowledge at all.
So it's unavoidable that there that there's circularity here, right? For example, how do we know logic is logical? Well, this is the classic response of Aristotle to the sofus. It's repeated by John Damascus in Fountain of Knowledge at the very beginning where he says that well, if you deny that logic is logical, you're using logic to deny logic. And that's a contradiction. It's self-reputing. So, in other words, it's impossible. You can't do it. Logic is self-referencing as are other uh sort of assumed categories for the possibility of knowledge and meaning and predication.
Okay. So that's how our conception of predication, metaphysics, epistemology works. And in day-to-day parlance or in in an like in a literal courtroom setting where we're investigating a murder or a crime or something like that, everything is taking place at this at this level. Really, it's only philosophers, theologians, and metaphys metaphysicians who are asking questions at this level. pretty much no one else is. Science totally in this domain, right?
Science is 99.99999% of the time not in this domain. Right?
The only time I could think of a scientist being in this domain would be like if you counted uh you know like a mathematician as a scientist and there was some weird like math thing going on that applied to like computer science or something like that. In that case, maybe you could find a mathematician who's doing stuff at this level. uh you know a a cantor or a Gell you know that that would kind of count as this kind of a thing. But almost always all math and science empirical observation stuff is happening here.
But we know that this is the case this level one again because this is part of what philosophy does part of what philosophy investigates is questions at this level.
um you know the again the metaphysics of Aristotle right the the uh ideas of Plato uh Kant's uh transcendental categories would be these types of things I'm not saying those philosophers are right or wrong I'm just saying that those are examples of people who are doing things at this level so to speak now an atheist might want to say well well uh I just deny all these things there is no level one everything is just level two you are falsely thinking there's this other level everything's level two it's very easy to refute that right you can you can easily demonstrate that the uh objects of this domain are literally not known empirically so literally there's no way to empirically prove all the things that David Hume points out you can't empirically prove right so this is what David Hume does is that he helps us to understand that right uh this stuff can't get you to this stuff but this stuff presupposes this stuff right that's why human con are valuable not because we accept their systems. Their systems are absurd. They lead to foolishness. But they're two philosophers who presented argumentation that showed the logic of unbelief. You see?
So, so that's how we demonstrate that things at this level are circular at a paradigmatic or presuppositional level and that's unavoidable.
But when we talk about the day-to-day observations or the realm of science, we typically don't reference or allow for circularity. And in logic uh the fall this would be the fallacy of uh right vicious circularity right if I said for example well I know that um uh I know that we should always be truthful uh because um there's just uh an inherent truthfulness to saying the truth. Okay, that would be vicious circularity. That would be a fallacy right at this level. And that's obviously different from a question like how do I know that there is truth? That would be something at this level. And if I try to say well because of XYZ and you say oh but you're just assuming that there's truth to prove truth. I would say yeah.
But that's unavoidable for questions of preconditions.
Preconditions will involve circularity at some point. And again, that's because every worldview will involve circularity when you get down to its ultimate presuppositional starting points. So for the unbeliever, his starting point is almost always invariably his own mind, his own human autonomy, right? That's his presuppositional commitment and starting point because he's fallen.
Right? From our vantage point, that's why for the Christian, the ultimate vantage point, the ultimate starting point is God, right? And God is who undergurs these level one things we could say. So as you guys know when I present the transcendental argument I typically you know you can make a a a graph like this. The only thing is that I add one more step and I say you know level zero is God right? The triune God undergurs level one and level one undergurs level two. So hopefully that's helpful. I know there's a lot of words.
Uh that was just my madeup word salad to appear sophisticated. Literally none of those words actually have any meaning.
Half of them I just made up. But uh hopefully that's helpful.
>> Okay. I wanted to play that whole bit through then because I wanted to give Jay the space to say all of that in his own words and I didn't want to interrupt it too um too quickly because like I said I think that's the best bit of Jay Dyier on the internet and it's where he's lucid. His idea is, you know, I I don't agree with pretty much anything he said in it, but I think that's the best the best he can do in that video. Um, so I wanted to give him the time of day to play it all the way through, the kind of courtesy that he wasn't giving the opponents when we were playing clips of him earlier on in the video. Um, and I think there's a couple of things that are really interesting about that. Um so I guess the main thing to think is that like when he was moving from when he said level two the empirical sensatory stuff to the the transcendental objects right which things I think what he'd written up there was categories presuppositions and words have meaning were the things that he'd written up there when he was moving from that one level to the level two to level one the only real he gives two examples of how the argument is supposed to go there.
Um, one of them was the Arisatilian thing again, which I already showed it's a terrible argument. It's not going to work. So, that's out the window. Too bad for that one. The only other thing he said then was presupposing that words have meaning, right? And you got to think that words have meaning because you'd be using words and then presupposing that they have meaning if you were going to try and refute the claim that words have meaning. And maybe on its face, you think, well, that seems kind of plausible, right? uh you you do have to presuppose that words have meaning if you're going to deny that words have meaning it's just that you know that's also a pretty terrible argument right because what do you mean by meaning I mean there are theories of meaning that you might reject right so for instance you might have a kind of frigian theory of meaning which basically says something like there are these abstract objects things that sentences uh latch on to they're propositions or whatever. And they're the they're the the kind of arrayified objects of of meaning that um sentences have derivatively by kind of pointing at them or by your intention connecting it to them or something, right? But then I know hello Vickenstein you know later Vickenstein totally rejects that picture and constructs a completely different idea of what's going on when people are talking to each other which is you know summed up obviously far too briefly uh by by something like thinking that you know words that meaning that sorry use is is meaning right meaning isn't really a thing right he will deny that there is meaning in that sense of Frager's idea here and instead bit like Hume offering some kind of reductive account of what causation is in terms of habitual expectation Vickenstein's going to say something like well look there's just this bunches of behavior right this is a language games and blah blah blah so you you certainly can reject the thought that words have meaning if meaning you know means something theory laden right which Jay is always saying this stuff about there's no neutral way of assessing what people mean everything's totally saturated in the theories that they're surrounded But that's that just means that you can of course reject a given theoretical account of what it means for words to have meaning. So you can't just say listen using words presupposes that they have meaning. It only in the most thinnest paper thin sense that maybe I'll nod along and say you meaning I guess but in the back of my mind I might be a victinian and go yeah but you know what I'm saying is like a stuff about behavior cashing it out in terms of language games blah blah blah. If you're in the back of your mind thinking I'm thinking about these platonic objects I'm thinking about in a frag sense blah blah blah then of course we can disagree about that that's just the thing philosophers can disagree about and neither of them is like slam dunk presupposed just by using words right if that's and so here we have two examples one was the yeah everything presupposes the law of non-contradiction and the other one seems to be everything presupposes some account of meaning even though there's clearly diverging accounts of meaning that philosophers have put on the So Jay's method of just saying, well, everything must presuppose blah blah blah. I think the cleanest way to think about it is it just he presupposes some some folk theory of meaning. He presupposes some folk theory of logic.
So when he says something, he's superimposing that onto the world.
And he just thinks that you have to do that as well.
But the argument is required, right?
Just like with Aristotle, it doesn't just come for free. You have to actually argue for it. And you might give a terrible argument. And it seems to me that Jay Dad's there for that. And we just don't get any other example given it. Even though that's the best bit of Jay Diet that I've ever seen. Um it just seems that it's like falls away when you actually look at it. clearly that the idea that he has in mind is clear that you know to you have to presuppose these things otherwise some terrible consequence will happen. It's just that he doesn't ever actually justify that claim. None of the things he says and I've given him as much time I could as I could there to lay it all out and I don't think he ever says anything better than that and he constantly points towards K and says well it's a bit like K but it's not really it can't it can't be anything like K. He says it's just like Aristotle, but if so, then it's terrible. And then the other thing we've got is this word, you know, words must have meaning. What are you talking about? Right? It just it seems like you're presupposing some folk theory of meaning without giving an argument for it. So I think it's just completely disappointing.
And then if you think about it, let's suppose we grant him all of those things even though there's no reason to do that. And and we say, "Yeah, that's you're right, Jay. Actually, whenever anything happens, I must presuppose all these aristatilian categories of substance and like permanence and like spacoral location and causality and whatever the [ __ ] you want, like you can have all of those things.
Do those things presuppose the orthodox god, right? How do we get from those things to the orthodox god? Because now if we try and impose the same method again, it was already woefully implausible at the first from level two to level one. How about how good is it plausibly from level two, level one to level zero, right? From the transcendental objects to the divine, is it better now? Is it any good? Does it work? And I think the answer has to be is is it worse? It's worse than that because it seems like there's no direct way of going from the suppose I think that there are I don't know platonic frigian meanings that exist in in the world and that they have to exist for communication to be possible.
How does that mean that the orthodox conception of Christianity has to be true? Think about how much work you'd have to do to try and get someone to believe that. Right? It's not going to be like with Aristotle at least you can kind of be fooled if you squint at it by thinking I've said something and I'm committed to being consistent. So I'm committed to this principle that everything is consistent like that. You could sort maybe at least it's about consistency. Um but like if I presuppose numbers Jay Jay wants to say well numbers are grounded in God. But how?
Why think that? Right? You could be a divine conceptualist like Plantinger was a divine conceptualist. But you owe me an argument. It's not going to be this same argument. It's not going to just be that like if I don't presuppose that numbers are grounded in the mind of God, then I'm contradicting myself. Of course, I'm not. How is that? Show me the contradiction. Jay's never shown the contradiction for that. And in fact, what contemporary mathematicians think is going on with grounding in terms of numbers? Do you think the the natural numbers are grounded in the Zumelo Frankle set theoretic hierarchy? Right?
That you have the empty set, you have the set of the empty set, you have the set that contains the set that contains the empty set, etc. That's 0 1 2 3 and it's a kind of potential infinite sequence that goes on forever, right?
Ground, it's wellounded sequence. Um they they think that's, you know, some of them do anyway, those who think there is grounding going on in that sort of sense. Uh why? because it's got a structural similarity to the thing that they think is grounded in it. The numbers display the same structural properties as this um set theoretic hierarchy. Now, okay, I'm not saying that's a good argument, but like what's it got to do with the mind of God? try and tell me try and wrestle that argument off me that position out of my hands and then tell me that I have to in believe that in its place the thing that's grounding numbers is the orthodox Christian God like just try help me out some way with that.
So I think we just never get that argument. Sometimes Jay vaguely says things like divine conceptualism and then it just keeps waffling on in a different direction. He never spends any time unpacking that. But I wanted to end on one bit that was quite funny because there's another thing that Jay says a lot which is about so typically in the presuppositional arguments they don't really get into this level of detail about the level two the level one blah blah blah Jay wants to talk about that and sometimes he talk he says oh you don't understand about paradigms and blah blah blah and people just what are you talking about this that video he was just explaining then that's what he's talking about but most of the time what happens is the discussion is just like um you say that whatever it is the transcendental object presupposes that god exists and then people go well how come I couldn't be just you know an atheist platonist or something how come this worldview doesn't explain them uh and that worldview does and basically like I said I think it just comes down to Jay what he should do is just admit that this is a um an inference to the best explanation and try and motivate it being the best explanation which basically what he's doing anyway but he insists No, no, it's the impossibility of the country. Only the Christian, the orthodox Christian worldviews, the only one that can ground it, that can give an account for it that's that's coherent, that's consistent. All of the other ones are self-contradictory. They they make knowledge impossible. All of this presuppo terminology that we're so used to. Only the pre the orthodox Christian worldview can do that and all of the others can't. So back in I don't know 10 years ago or something I wrote a blog post that seemingly is is sometimes thread malpasses asses sort of manifest about about the problem with tag and one of the things was uh that I was arguing was well look it just looks like there's an infinite number of possible worldviews. So if what you're saying is my worldview is the only one that's consistent and all of the others are inconsistent, then the burden that that claim takes is you have to now show that an infinite number of worldviews are are literally inconsistent. So you're going to have to show me what the contradiction is with an infinite variety of worldviews. And surely such a task is impossible. You're not going to be able to actually show an infinite number of worldviews is impossible. Give me a second.
Now, Jay's well aware of this objection.
Maybe he doesn't credit it with me.
Maybe I'm being bigheaded and thinking it's it's about what I said, but nevertheless, that objection exists. And people put it to Jay quite often.
And he's developed a kind of response to it, which is to say, I don't have to refute an infinite I don't have this infinite task like a Achilles tortoise or something. I I I have a finite set of things to do. Actually, it's not even that many because what I can do is reduce the task by sort of categorizing out the world views and just knocking out one category at a time. And by that way, you can take what looks like getting rid of an infinite number of things. It's like imposing a measure on a real field or something so that they can just say this is the boundary between zero and one, and I can just knock that out. And that means I don't have to go through each of the points that exist between zero and one on a real number line. It's like imposing a grid on top and then just like being able to remove sector by sector and that way taking out chunks rather than individual points. Right?
So let's hear Jay doing that here.
Bring a [ __ ] video to play.
And this relates then to you have to disprove every worldview.
No, I don't because this is again a mistake.
Uh that was the first mistake, right, of not understanding higher order and lower order argumentation. When you confuse those two, that's when you might think I have to disprove every single worldview.
No, all I have to do is disprove given what my argument is. So don't straw man my argument. If you want to deal with my argument, my argument is that every worldview has basic assumptions in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology, you're very limited in the number of steps you can go in each one of those domains. For example, is reality uh created or uncreated, right? Is it eternal or does it have a beginning in time?
Is knowledge possible or impossible?
Is there an external world or not?
uh are there objective ethics or not? So I can structure a bunch of either ors and every step that the theoretical opponent takes will determine the rest of that system down the road. But as you can see you're you are actually very limited. So when we understand that this is actually how worldviews function that every worldview by necessity can be boiled down to very limited either or starting points.
There's not an infinite number of worldviews. The variations in worldviews are down the line. There's only a certain number of questions or places that you even could start a worldview.
So even if you came up with hypothetically some objection or some starting point that we haven't thought about, it's not going to really matter because for example any position that I take about uh if I set up either or questions like do you think the universe is teological or distological right that's a binary that either way you answer that is going to immediately determine many other aspects of your worldview. So do you see how any either or question that's a that's a first principle we could call it for a worldview it's automatically going to determine quite a bit about your worldview and right away you're already going to be stuck in a bind. So for example the way that I answer that question if I say well the universe I think is random chaos and chance it's distological has no ultimate purpose or movement to it. If you go that route you all already boxed yourself into a bunch of problems. Do you see? So it's I think it's just missing the point to say that well what if what if there's some other possible worldview but there's not going to be that many possible worldviews or answers to uh intentional either or question questions as first principles universe eternal or does it have a beginning? Are ethics objective or are they relative? Uh is there an external world or not? uh you know it's like any of the ways that you start to answer these like you're immediately boxing in you're not going to have infinite number of ways to go about answering those because every every worldview is forced into a limited number of starting points is the point.
>> Yeah.
>> All right. So play two different clips there back to back um just with him saying basically the same thing. And you you can hear this a lot. I call this like the permutation of world views argument. So the the whole point is he's trying to escape from the thought that you need to refute an infinite number of world views which he thinks would be impossible. So or at least one by one having to go through an infinite number of wealthies refuting each of them and instead he's saying there's only a limited number of first moves you can make and that limits the cases down. So you know I'll be able to knock them out more manageably at least in principle.
Seem to have gone out of focus for some reason. I think the microphone's getting in the way. I don't know if this helps.
Does that then focus it back on I don't know if it actually works. Anyway, so the methodology is clear there, right?
But I thought well you know Jay says this so often but he never actually specifies um how many uh questions there would have to be in order for this method to be uh plausible or even effective. Right? But he does emphasize over and over again that it's not that many and you know it's got to be an ethics, metaphysics and epistemology.
So let's suppose for instance and and and he he often calls them either or questions you know is the universe teological or distological does it have a beginning or does it not have a beginning is knowledge possible or is it not possible those are the types of examples that he gave and and he often gives so I mean if you think about it let's give this absurdly simplifying assumption that there are 10 questions like that you know let's say there's four metaphysics questions three ethics questions and three epistemology questions, right? That seems crazy because of course there's just tons and tons of questions about epistemology that you might want to ask. Um, so it's it's insanely simplifying, but let's just go with it for the sake of getting our heads around the numbers.
Let's just assume for the sake of the argument that those questions are independent. So I could I could think that, you know, externalism about knowledge is true, but also that the universe had a beginning.
or I could be an internalist about knowledge and think that the universe didn't have a beginning. Those two questions have nothing to do with each other. So, we should have combinations of those positions available. And Jay's claim is that no matter which way you go on those, if you answer the questions wrong, it's going to mean that your worldview is inconsistent. But if you answer the worldviews uh according to the orthodox uh picture, then you'll find that actually that's consistent.
And that that's the proof. That's the way that you can show every other worldview is inconsistent. His is the only one that works. But if you had 10 questions, 10 binary questions that are independent, how many combinations does that result in? Well, it's two to the^ of 10. So that's 1,024 possible combinations.
It doesn't seem like getting just 10 questions, but as long as our answers are all independent, uh, it's 2 to the^ of 10. So could Jay refute 1,024 worldviews? Maybe, maybe he could. I don't know is sort of project you might commit yourself to writing a big book or you've got a chapter on each one of those or a big series of books and then Jacob proved that Christianity is true by by doing that. Right? So I think it's helpful to like cash out what the sort of numbers are to get your head around the scale of the task. I mean certainly refuting 124 worldviews would be easier than refuting an infinite number. So fair enough.
But it can't be that really can it? And here's here's now my argument because let's think about if we did that methodology and we asked four questions in metaphysics, three in epistemology and three in in ethics. I don't think that that would be fine grained enough to be able to actually specify the doctrines of the orthodox Christian worldview because for instance I'd have to ask at least you know it can't just be does the universe exist? Is reality real? Whatever these kind of boilerplate questions were that Jay was asking. I'd have to ask, does God exist? Did Jesus live? You know, is God triune? Uh, that wouldn't that would only just about get me basic bones Christianity. To get orthodox Christianity, I'd have to have something about like the the council of Nika, the the authority of the patriistic teachings. I'd have to have something about the energy essence distinction, blah blah blah blah blah.
Right? It's clearly I'd have to have a lot more questions than just just those basic 10. Um, I think that let's say that Orthodox Christianity requires another 10 questions drilling down through the different versions of Christianity before you get to the sect of Christianity that Jay thinks is the only one that can give you a coherent account of of the transcendental objects or whatever. So, if Jay's allowed to have I mean that seems that seems right because otherwise what would happen is you would you'd knock out all these sectors, right? You could show maybe every sector is inconsistent but then you know what would be the conclusion?
And Jay would say, "Well, my worldview is not been shown to be inconsistent."
But that would just mean that there are world views that are outside the the grid that he imposed. What it would mean is that like the grid that we put down is too coarse grained to catch him. It' be like a fish that darted through a net where the holes were too big to catch it. So in order to catch Orthodox Christianity, we'd have to make the net have much much more finely grained in order to be able to catch it. Right? how how fine the grain would it have to be to capture um orthodox Christianity. I suggest that another you know absurdly simplifying assumption would be and maybe another 10 questions about theology before we would nail it down to roughly what Jay would say. Probably more than that if you think about it realistically. I'm sure there's all sorts of inter sectarian disputes between different types of orthodox and different types of whatever you to capture Jay's view and say that's the only one that's going to give us the proper grounding for everything. Let's say 10 questions in addition to the ones we already had. But now it can't just be that there are just like the 10 boilerplate questions, four metaphysics, three epistemology, three ethics, and then 10 very precise theological questions that narrow you down into Greek orthodoxy or whatever it is. Can't just be that because that just seems completely ad hoc, right? The sort of thing Jay doesn't like ad hoc stuff. So um in order to be sort of realistic about it, you should allow basically everybody the same level of fine grainedness on their view that Jay's helping himself to. So if Jay's allowed another 10 very specific questions to define his view, then everybody should be allowed to do the same. Right? So I should be able to not just have three questions about say ethics but I should be able to drill deeper down into sort of you know is it particularism or is it you know emotivism and blah blah blah. I should be allowed to cut the pie as finely as Jay does at the very least in order to define a worldview with the same level of granularity that Jay does.
So let's suppose then that there are a hundred questions not just 10. Even that seems like absurdly simpl simplified, right? That just a hundred questions in philosophy and every worldview would be captured with them. Even then seems crazy because it's like a you know the openings of a game of chess or something. There isn't just a hundred ways you can move in the first bunch of moves, right? There's millions and millions. But let's just say there's a hundred, right? Different uh questions that you can have. And if we suppose that those questions are independent again, so that any combination could be had between them. I mean, you know, may maybe that's wrong, right? Maybe that's wrong. But balancing out against, I think, the 100 questions is a massive simplification. Independence helps with the maths, but maybe that's uh implausible as well. But some, you know, it'll balance out somewhere around that.
Um, we're not now talking about,24 different world views. Um, the number of worldviews is I can't even say it because the number is so big. That's the number, right? I mean, it's the I don't even know that there are words to to express a number that that's this big.
And if you're listening along to this, the numbers, it's got like 30 digits or something to it. Um, so that's two to the^ of 100. Now, to get your head around the scale of that number, um, the number of particles in the universe is estimated at something like two 2 to the^ of 85. Um, and and 2 to the^ of 100 completely dwarfs 2 to the^ of 85, right? It's not just a bit different.
It's it's immeasurably greater than that. So this number is like swamps the number of particles that there are in the universe. Um to get your head around what this means um if J did nothing but refute worldviews throughout the entire history of the observable universe you know for 13.8 billion years Jay just refuted world views at the rate of 2.9 trillion world views a second for 13.8 billion years.
he would only just now have finished that task. Right? And that's with the simplifying assumption that there are in fact only a hundred questions that we would need to be able to define all of the worldviews that are possible. So I think this just kind of gets your head around the fact that J strategy here.
Okay. Yeah. I guess in a sense you don't have to refute infinitely many worldviews. But being even moderately realistic about what the task entails that he's given himself, it still seems like that's not really helping him in any sense that that makes any difference. Right? The point I'm making is that like as far as I'm concerned, the move from level two to level one, his kind of empirical world to this world of the transcendental objects. I might even might even pick fault with with that distinction. But I suppose we go along with that distinction. The arguments that he gave from moving from that first level to the second level just seem hopeless.
If we pretend that there is some argument that gets you from level two to level one, the prospect of there being an argument that gets you from level one from the transcendental objects to the divine, his method for doing that, the one that he's um championed just seems, if you actually cash out the numbers in any sense, just seem completely hopeless as well for a slightly different reason.
Right? He would have to be doing knocking out 2.9 trillion world views every second for 13.8 billion years to have got here. Maybe I was a bit off by my numbers, but you know what I mean.
It's not going to be it's not going to make it go suddenly down to something like a hundred or something, is it? Um, so yeah, I think I'm gonna stop talking about Jai now. I kind of have a look at the questions, see if there's any chats going on. I think this is where I'm going to find out that my I ended the the stream an hour ago.
Um, all right, good. So, first first comment I saw. This is actually poor form here, Alex. Is it what? Sorry, I don't know what you mean.
Uh, all right. Let's see. I'm going to look at the live chat so I can see if there's any super chats and I kind of honor the donation. Um, Someone's saying, "Do you have a link or phone call?" The phone number I can call you live right now. No, I'm not doing live debates right now. Thanks. Maybe a different day.
Um, all right. Cool. Not seeing any direct questions. Happy to take questions if there are any now or I could just go to bed.
Uh, Malpest stream almost over with minimal technology issues. Yes, that's true. We almost got there. I think there were some.
I will try and have tech issues next time. I kind of feel like the audience is missing it when there aren't many.
Um, so someone says, "Do you think that Dier's argument Steelman has any force to it?" Well, no. I mean, I've tried to do I've tried to genuinely do it as much justice as I think I can. Um, and I've given you my reasons for seeming for thinking that that doesn't work. Um, so hopefully that and without just doing the whole two hours again, hopefully you can uh you can get there. Nathan says, "Question for Alex. How nice one."
Thanks, Nate. Nathan, that's great. Um, why do you turn his transcendental argument into an inductive survey over every worldview? You're not addressing the actual argument. I am actually I address Exactly. I I played a bit of Jay saying the thing himself before I did that. Jay says you can uh you don't have to refute every worldview one by one.
You can just examine the starting points and then uh take out chunks of world views in that way. So I did exactly what he said. That is his argument. Um so like what does Jay mean by contradiction? He has to say that there's contradiction on X view and that they can't revise their view. Um, I think maybe you're asking like whether there's some nonworldview notion of contradiction. Um, I think that's that's another thing I've talked about before, which is I think this presuppositional method. You can get a bit hung up on um what you know what what's a presupposition, what's on a world view, blah blah blah. Um, and actually they they often presuppose a lot of stuff that's neutral ground like that contradictions are bad, blah blah blah.
um that you know you you can actually rationally call into question like so for instance the dialtheist etc etc um so maybe Jay has a view about what a contradiction is which also has this normative element which is that it's bad and you can't have it or something um and then that's just presupposed without argument and it's part of the machinery that he's sneaking in. Uh so that's that all sounds right. Hopefully I got the idea of your question there.
I've strawmaned both Jay untag. I mean, all right, I've done my best to play Jay saying the stuff that he said as much as I could. I let him talk for like 15 minutes in the middle and um if you think that's straw manning, that's up to you. But, you know, some people are just going to say that no matter what.
Um, I'm totally nuts and disconnected from reality. Okay, great.
I kind of get the feeling that if I uh turned my eye towards Jay that people would be annoyed about that. Um question, can't you refute worldviews in groups? For example, every worldview that doesn't have objective morality is false because objective morality is true. I mean, yeah, you could if you can do that, then okay, great. Let's say we could just like refute every worldview that said that there was objective morality. But the question is like can you like is there actually a good argument for that? what all what you can do is like give an argument like a philosopher might give uh but that doesn't mean it's successful like Aristotle gave his argument for the presupposing the law of non-contradiction but actually um it's it's not game over once you've just given an argument actually has to be a good argument um and most of the time I think if you're going to give an argument which is um so wide wide ranging and sweeping um the idea that it won't have any possible push back or counter examples is is implausible Um uh is he just saying that there's a contradiction because God exists and every view believes the negation is contrary? But then he's already missing the agnostics.
Um well, yeah, that every every view that says God doesn't exist is contradictory because God does exist or something.
Honestly, I don't know. I think that there's um that there's some um yeah, there's there's just some like inability to understand how somebody might see the world differently that's going on with Jay. Like I like I said, I think um like I think that uh what am I trying to say now? I'm getting now I'm feeling kind of tired.
Um yeah, I can't remember what I was going to say already. I've forgotten. I'm trying to read and think of answers at the same time is quite difficult actually. It turns out um did you see FDA's revised argument attempts to avoid the refute 1000 worldviews? I didn't.
But I mean I don't I think I need to like not think about orthodox debate me bros for a bit. I do something else for a while. Um but I could I could come back to that. Um, Bina Barry says, "Alex, what's your thoughts on fictionalism regarding grounding?" Um, I mean, it's I think it's one of those questions where like grounding is like, um, you could have different views on on what grounds what in different areas.
So, you might you might find some account of of grounding plausible in one area, but not in another. So, it's not just one of those things you can just say, I think this about grounding. I think it's more a question of like if somebody proposes one thing grounding another thing that's a sort of concrete proposal you might have a view about but it I'm not sure I can say anything about just grounding in general. Um you know sometimes fictionalism might be appropriate and sometimes it might not be. Not sure that's very helpful.
Um modern atheism says do you think the problem of induction has any solution?
Um well I mean not not not straightforwardly. No I mean it's one of those perennial problems that's um that's perennial. You know it sticks around. It's like hard solopism or something. Um I think it's a it's a it's an it's an epistemological problem.
Right. So like um if if you're allowed to postulate metaphysical things like that there are objects that have um that obey laws of nature or something then you've already you've got now a metaphysical kind of construction that from which you can derive expectations about what the future's going to be like and you might think oh maybe I do know that the future's going to be like the past but the problem is epistemological because it's not about like um if I just postulate that some stuff exists can I just rely on that stuff behaving the way I postulated it would do like clockwork.
It's about thinking like well um anything any any uh proposal that I make make about how the world is going to be could be wrong and it might just be whatever I've thought about whatever I've experienced up till now I could be wrong about that. So if I propose that you know there are objects with co consistent natures or something and that they're going to behave like clockwork into the future uh that thought might be wrong. I might be wrong about that. And as an epistemological thing does seem quite hard to get get away from that. So for instance the presuppositionist wants to say something like they sort of press the epistemological part of that problem and say you know you as an as an atheist can't get out of the problem of induction because you you can't know as an empiricist that um that the future's going to be like the past. But then it's like well how do how do you as a theist get out of that problem? And they just say well God tells me that the future's going to be like the past. But then here comes back the epistemological part of our problem again because like well how do you know that when God said that that was going to be the case that it is going to be the case in the future? Oh, it's because God's like always truthful.
Well, I don't how do you know that? It's because he's been truthful up till now because that's begging the question again. It's the same issue just you know how do you know that God's nature is going to be truthful into the future?
It's just another projection of induction. So I think that like it's not a problem for atheists. It's like the um it's like the how do you get an or from an is it's just a problem for everybody.
Um there's no like special theist out outcome of this. What presuppositionists do is just hijack philosophical problems and and push them on you until you feel worried about them and then very quickly tell you that that's not a problem on Christianity and then hope you don't actually ask them exactly how that is.
At least that's my view. Um, Richard Carrier says also they can't refute groups of worldviews without presupposing their worldview. But the point is that things may ground in other worldviews. So they have to rule those out first somehow. And I think this I think what you're getting at is this kind of issue of um like like doing an internal critique and and not presupposing your own like framework when you're analyzing somebody else's.
And I think that that that's kind of like um it becomes this kind of like something quite similar in presuppositionalism with postmodernism where you end up thinking that like there's no objective framework with with which to like analyze a text or something and um or we're just stuck in our in our own heads or whatever. Uh philosophy speak a gift. I don't really know what that means but that's quite cool. Thank you very much for that. Um hopefully that hopefully that means money. That would be great. Um, Felix again is asking for a phone number. Like, I'm not doing a debate right now, bro. So, you know, thanks, but that's not going to happen this evening. Um, someone says, "Who is FDA?
Why is he compared to Jay?" FDA is Father Deacon Ananas. And that's one of Jay D's uh buds, and they do loads of videos together and put out content.
Father Deacon Ananas is a a an orthodox guy with a PhD and who does um philosophy stuff as well. And then my last video is about him.
Um okay, I'm going to take one or two more.
question is Jay combining Heracitis, Democratus, and Protagoras into one dude and then saying they led they led to Matt Dillah Hunter. Yes, I think that's probably right. And actually, I think it's the Yeah, that's right. In the Metaphysics 4, it's the followers of Protagoras who uh is actually the the kind of villain uh because Protagoras says something like all things are in one or something like that and then uh Aristotle conruses that as them being committed to a contradiction. Um, so yeah, I don't think it's the sophist. I think Jay conflates the sophists with people who follow Protagoras.
Oh yeah, Joe Davis uh asked and I think you asked it before about the virtuous vicious circularity distinction. Um I don't I don't I've never really seen a good way of just drawing that distinction. So like um if like a a vicious circle, you think this is some kind of like intellectual kind of fauxar. You're doing something like irrational or whatever when you're doing something viciously circular. So that's like something like justifying X with Y but justifying Y with X. So the kind of justification never seems to like get out of this. And you think, well, what's any justification for believing either of those things in the first place? Some kind of like that seems to be something like the problem. Um, okay, great. So, what's virtuous circularity going to be? And I'm not really clear on that. I suppose the closest I can get to is it just sometimes people construe like coherentism in general or kind of quinian post two dogmas empiricism as as circular. But I'm not sure that that's even fair. I mean like it's it's certainly not circular in the same way like coherence uh coherence epistemology seems to me it's um it's not foundational but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be um necessarily circular as a consequence like as if it's just a a grippers trillemma and there's nothing else. Um but anyway um uh Alejandro Seatoto Seetto uh have you talked about divine conceptionism with anyone after James Anderson? Um not like um critically?
Um no not really. I've talked to people.
I've mean I've talked informally to philosophy friends of mine, but um I've not like had a debate with a Christian about divine conceptualism since then.
No.
Um Bina Barry says metaphysical grounding I'm thinking about specifically. So you're talking about metaphysical grounding and in terms of like fictionalism. Um I think I'm still going to have to beg off that question for now. my brain's just not really working as much as it might do cuz it's like half 10. So I think um I've had a I've had um a moderator in the chat doing doing the lord's work weeding out crazy people it looks like.
Um so we haven't had a moderator before. I I like to think this is a nice community of people, but obviously there are sometimes some people and if I'm going to be picking on Jay Dy, we can only expect that there would be a couple of crazies in the chat. Um, yeah, look, Felix, I don't know how to say this any more times, man. I'm not going to take a phone call now. I'm going to go to bed in a minute. So, another day, bro.
All right. And in fact, I think I'm just going to like call it a day there. So, thanks very much for all of this stuff and like and subscribe and you know the deal, blah blah blah, whatever. Um, I'll put out a post in a few days and we'll start gathering in some more ideas for for something else to do next time, but it's not going to be presuppy things. Um, and then or last thing, Joe Davis, Alex, really talk to Jay again or forever? No.
I mean, I just I just think he's bit of I just don't really know. I think the answer is no. I think this is probably it. All right, cool. I'm that bombshell.
I'll see you next time.
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