Introduction to Humanities II

Today we started with Sam Harris' TED talk on The Moral Landscape. This is a great way to initiate discussion on the text selected for today's topic that I posted in Blackboard and everyone read by Hilary Putnam "The Collapse of the Fact / Value Dichotomy. Putnam seems right that since Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism the dichotomy between the analytic and synthetic types of knowledge has collapsed and that precipitated the collapse between fact and value as well. Today we consider all facts to be embedded in a complex system or language game shared by speakers who agree on what they consider to be true - and their agreement is what makes those statements facts. (Their agreement would certainly also be likely only if there was environmental support for their beliefs.) So how does this tie in to Sam Harris' presentation? There is a movement to claim certain values are not subjective but scientific and this ignores the subjectivity inherent in what are considered facts. The fact / value distinction has collapsed but that is because we know so called facts are dependent on a set of values that are no more objective than those of other cultural groups. Notice also the critique by Ross Douthat that is concerned with this same mistake. The quiz question today was which picture would you rather find yourself in, of the two shown by Sam Harris. The one on the left, or the one on the right?