What Will Be Daniel Peterson's White Crow?

[Physics Guy]

A single believable account of anything is too little to disprove anything. The bar is higher than that.

[Doctor Scratch]

This is excellent work, Dr. Stak. It demonstrates that you've read more in the past couple of days than Dr. Peterson has read in all of 2022, since he only ever reads the back cover and first and last few pages of any given book. He just *skims,* you see. And yes: what of the so-called "white crow"? What strikes me perhaps most significantly about your analysis is this:

It is worth noting that James did not enjoy this kind of inquiry. He pursued it in part to maintain a critical pressure on what he called Scientific Sectarianism—the people who were sure beforehand. But the work itself James found tedious, undignified, often disgusting—‘a human rathole life’. He reflected that there was no reason why spirit messages—or “counterfeits” either—should be entertaining or dramatic, anymore than backyard conversation.

Indeed--quite the opposite of the approach that the Mopologists usually take. And your contrasting of James with Amberts is instructive. While DCP, Midgley, and others want to act as if they "enjoy" the intellectual company of writers like William James, C.S. Lewis, and so on, the truth is that, at heart, they are a lot more like Amberts--which is to say, intellectual crackpots and charlatans. That's why it has always struck me as ironic and hypocritical that they have such loathing for Rodney Meldrum and Jonathan Neville and others like them: it's like they're looking in a mirror but they fail to recognize themselves.

In any case, per their own theology, William James is now in a lower kingdom and likely is a TK Smoothie, so perhaps that helps to explain why they feel that they're on a "level playing field" with his ideas.

[Res Ipsa]

Thanks, Dr. Stak. Interesting dissection.

[N_N]

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't two nders seeing two contradictory things at the end the tunnel (Jesus and Buddha and Allah and whatever) negate the experience as indicative of veracity?

[drumdude]

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't two nders seeing two contradictory things at the end the tunnel (Jesus and Buddha and Allah and whatever) negate the experience as indicative of veracity?

We just ignore that little mess. Welcome to apologetics!

[Gadianton]

Forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't two nders seeing two contradictory things at the end the tunnel (Jesus and Buddha and Allah and whatever) negate the experience as indicative of veracity?

Sure, but what I want to know is why it has to be something as dramatic as seeing Jesus in a tunnel? If a single person out of the billions who have lived on this planet feels the promptings of the Holy Ghost, then all it takes is one. There really is a Holy Ghost.

[DrStakhanovite]

I liked your observation of the buildup "you mustn't seek to show that all crows are black; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white". The thing is, skeptics.org types preach this very same thing in order to exorcise any possible trace of dogma in the white castle of science. Richard Feynman not excepted. The entire turtle stack can be toppled, crashing the highest of all turtles by a single grunt from the bottom turtle. One experiment in a garage in Texas and Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford are overturned forever.

There is a tendency for believers in Creation Science and Intelligent Design embroiled in the origins debate to take a hard line concerning the demarcation between science and pseudoscience so they can turn around and say something akin to “Neo-Darwinism cannot be observed nor can it be reproduced, thus it isn’t a proper science and should be considered a historical view”. I had always assumed they picked up this tactic as a way to turn their opponents weapons against them.

I think the Creation Science/Intelligent Design crowd is where Daniel gets most of his ideas concerning the philosophy of science. His general strategy of setting up some easy conditions for success and then meeting those conditions effortlessly reads so much like an Answers in Genesis handout.

Think of that cheesy “Christopher Hitchens Memorial File” thing he does, it follows the same rough pattern: use a book’s subtitle to establish a universal proposition and then present every news headline you come across that contradicts it. Really it is the equivalent of Daniel wearing a go-pro while he makes layups on a hoop hung above his garage accompanied with Stan Bush’s ‘The Touch’ and then putting this footage on youtube as evidence that he’s some tenacious street baller.

I mean sure, it is absurd, but it is entertaining.

[DrStakhanovite]

A single believable account of anything is too little to disprove anything. The bar is higher than that.

In the abstract/idealized setting it is, the idea that all crows are black could be expressed in predicate logic as:

∀x :C(x) ⟹ B(x)

Or you could express it in set notation as:

{x : C(x)} ⊆ {x : B(x)}

Either way, finding an "x" that is a crow ("C") but not black ("~B") is enough to say either formulation has a false value. However, I think you are speaking to the reality of how things are done in actual practice and you'd be correct. I think James using the Crow example was to convey a notion of falsification to motivate experimentation and research in areas little understood, because the vast majority of what is going on in the natural sciences can't easily be expressed in manner I have above and neither is any meaningful thesis about the metaphysical nature of reality.

[DrStakhanovite]

Indeed--quite the opposite of the approach that the Mopologists usually take. And your contrasting of James with Amberts is instructive. While DCP, Midgley, and others want to act as if they "enjoy" the intellectual company of writers like William James, C.S. Lewis, and so on, the truth is that, at heart, they are a lot more like Amberts--which is to say, intellectual crackpots and charlatans. That's why it has always struck me as ironic and hypocritical that they have such loathing for Rodney Meldrum and Jonathan Neville and others like them: it's like they're looking in a mirror but they fail to recognize themselves.

The Mopologist disdain of Heartlanders is a perfect example of Freud's narcissism of petty differences, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't them taking a chance to relive the days when their opponents were the likes of James White and J.P. Holding.

[Rivendale]

Please explain DCP, how the Laffertys aren't the "white crow" to your delusional witnesses, showing how unreliable witnesses to the fantastical can be.

Every time he is backed into a corner this surfaces.

Simply put, epistemic distance can be taken to mean as a distance in knowledge or awareness. In this religious hypothesis, the world would remain “religiously ambiguous”, that is, there is no conclusive evidence for or against the existence of God. People are left with a choice.