머니투데이 "거리두기 4단계는 사실상 비상계엄...정부 백신방역 방기 결과" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- '가면' 벗은 바이든에 대만 완전패닉 | 신세기TV 신세기티비 https://youtu.be/SGip4EqplCQ ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 경제는 화초, 시들면 회복 안 돼 조동근 명지대 경제학과 교수 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 中 방첩대장, 美 망명. 왜 DIA로 갔나? 명단은? #460. 210711. 백구산 캠츠 https://youtu.be/lK79ZR658GM ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "무고한 사람을 죽이는 것은 잘못된 일이다."라는 명제가 거짓은 아니지만, 가치 판단을 할 때는, 참이나 거짓이 적용되지 않는다고 믿는 사람들이 있다. 더구나 일부는 그것이 진실처럼 말하지만, 그것은 아직 논쟁 중이며, 철학자들의 일치된 합의는 아직 나오지 않았다. McCloskey on Philosophy David Gordon Economists often concentrate on narrow technical specialties. In doing so, they sometimes fall into philosophical errors, because they uncritically take for granted assumptions that are philosophically mistaken or at least controversial. The most common instance of this is familiar. Many economists assume that normative judgments, as opposed to descriptive ones, are subjective. It makes no sense, they think, to claim that our moral judgments are true or false. “The demand curve slopes downward to the right” is true, but “killing the innocent is wrong” is not, even though many people accept this judgment. Not that these economists think “killing the innocent” is false: it’s just that truth and falsity are the wrong predicates to use when assessing value judgments. I’m not going to argue against this position here, though I think it’s mistaken. The point I’d like to stress is different. The economists who hold this view don’t realize that it’s controversial and needs to be supported by argument. They think that “everybody” knows that normative judgments are subjective and that they are just reminding us of something obvious when they say it. Had they looked at the philosophical literature, they would have quickly discovered that many philosophers reject their view and defend moral objectivity, on various grounds. It’s not that no one defends the subjectivist view; quite the contrary. But because they don’t know the state of play in philosophy, the economists I have in mind blithely proceed unawares. To avert a misunderstanding, what is at issue here is not that in explaining human action, economists properly use the subjective preferences people hold. That is not a normative question. The economist Deirdre McCloskey is not a narrow technical specialist. She has read widely in history, literature, and philosophy. Unfortunately, she displays another failing, different from that of the narrow technical specialists I have just criticized. She doesn’t understand contemporary philosophy well, despite the range of her reading. I’d like to illustrate this problem from her well-known book, Knowledge and Persuasion in Economics (Cambridge University Press, 1994). She mentions this book in her recently published Bettering Humanomics (University of Chicago Press, 2021) and so far as I am aware, she has not changed her opinion about the issues I’ll be discussing. In the earlier book, she says: Likewise, “fact” is not to be determined merely by kicking stones or knocking tables. That a fact is a fact relative only to a conceptual scheme is no longer controversial, if it ever was. Kant knew it. So should we. Studies of science over the past few decades have shown repeatedly that facts are constructed by words. There is nothing shameful in this logic and fact of scientific rhetoric. (p. 41) McCloskey says that it’s no longer controversial that a fact is a fact relative only to a conceptual scheme; but one of the most famous papers in analytic philosophy in the past fifty years is Donald Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” which rejects the whole notion. Davidson says, Philosophers of many persuasions are prone to talk of conceptual schemes. Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience: they are points of views from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene…. Reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another…. Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. The trouble is, as so often in philosophy, it is hard to improve intelligibility while retaining the excitement. At any rate that is what I shall argue. (p. 5) At the end of his article, Davidson sums up his argument in this way: In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth—quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. (p. 20) My complaint isn’t that McCloskey disagrees with Davidson; it is that she is unaware of what is going on in the field she’s writing about and so manifests her own ignorance. It is as if an economist were to say, “It’s no longer controversial that if there is a recession, the government should spend massively on public works.” Things are even worse. In her book, McCloskey makes clear that she admires and agrees with the philosopher Richard Rorty, and he is a principal source for her conceptual relativism. She says, for example, that “as Richard Rorty and others have noted, ‘The world is out there, but descriptions of reality are not’” (p. 200). McCloskey does not realize that one of the key themes in Rorty’s philosophy is his rejection of the scheme-content distinction. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1981), Rorty says that the dualism of scheme and content is “a dogma which … is central to epistemology in general and empiricism in particular” (p. 259). To be sure, Rorty takes his rejection of the scheme-content distinction in a relativist way, as Davidson does not, and this may have confused McCloskey. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 위험 감수의 가치 캐나다 출신의 변호사 프랭크 버클리가 쓴 책 의 서평 생존으로는 충분하지 않다. 우리는 더 나아가 창조하고, 투쟁하고, 싸움에서 지지 말고, 세상에 대해 호기심을 가져야 한다. 모든 지식의 발전과 모든 기업들은 호기심 많은 사람들의 창조물이다. 사람들이 때로 실없는 짓을 하지 않았다면, 지적인 성취는 일어나지 않았을 것이다. 현대 미국에서 거대한 언론 집단이나 소셜 미디어에서 인정을 받으려면, 사회가 요구하는 가치에 순응하는 대가를 치러야 한다. The Value of Taking Risks David Gordon Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life by F. H. Buckley Encounter Books, 2021 xx + 228 pages Frank Buckley, a Canadian-born lawyer who teaches at the Scalia School of Law at George Mason University, has given us in this remarkable book a philosophy of life, based on unusually wide knowledge and penetrating reflection. In what follows, I shall discuss only a few of the topics he covers, concentrating on his observations about politics and economics. In doing so, I risk conveying a wrong impression of the book, as these topics by no means exhaust it; but Buckley himself emphasizes the value of taking risks. Buckley says, “Survival is not enough. We also need to create, to struggle and not to yield, to be curious about the world and what we owe other people. Every leap of knowledge and every entrepreneurial firm was created by a person who was curious.” His twelve rules of curiosity are these: don’t make rules; take risks; court uncertainties; be original; show grit; be interested in other people; be entertaining; be creative; be open to the world; don’t be smug; don’t overreach; and realize you’re knocking on heaven’s door. He tells us that “uncertainty isn’t the same as risk. With risks, you know the probabilities for different outcomes…. Uncertainty is different. There are different possible outcomes, but you won’t know the probabilities for each. Instead, you’re in Donald Rumsfeld’s world of unknown unknowns.” In our uncertain world, entrepreneurs who are willing to take chances when they cannot calculate the odds are crucially important for economic progress. “The anti-fragile entrepreneur [Nicolas Taleb’s term for those who thrive on uncertainty] must be willing to gamble on business opportunities. He’s looking for a payoff, and he’ll not put his time and money in government savings bonds or blue chip firms but on the uncertainty whose value can’t be measured before the wheel is spun. He’s the producer who creates something that beforehand, consumers never knew that they wanted. And that’s the story of the new, high-tech economy that gave us things we didn’t know we couldn’t do without.” He cites in support a comment by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If people did not sometimes do silly things … nothing intelligent would ever get done.” Buckley is fascinated by Wittgenstein and gives an excellent account of his life and personality. Many economists fail to recognize the importance of uncertainty, but the “Austrian school of economics is built around uncertain outcomes and the need for creative entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs who take a gamble. They may not know how to market their product, how to advertise or ship it; they don’t know who the customers are or where they live; and they don’t know if anyone wants it. But they bring a sense of ‘alertness’ to a business, one that recognizes an unfulfilled and even unrecognized consumer demand. What’s missing from Austrian economics, however is a way to recognize alertness before the fact.” But isn’t the whole Austrian point that this cannot be done? Bold entrepreneurs resemble original thinkers, who dare to challenge views that the mass media impose on us. “Writers crave attention and get it by attaching themselves to what George Orwell called the smelly little orthodoxies of the day…. And the nonconformists? In America, the great newspapers, the prime networks, apply a filter that excludes their voices, and they’re also silenced by the social media giants. The price of admission is conformity.” One such nonconformist was Henry Manne, one of the founders of the law and economics movement. This “perspective favored free market rules, and that’s what attracted Manne. He … thought that government planning would lead to economic waste and tyranny. With that in mind and brimming with self-confidence that he was first off the mark with a new discipline, he ventured into corporate law scholarship looking for people to shock. It didn’t take long. Even he was bowled over by the reaction to his Insider Trading and the Stock Market (1966) … academics took it for granted that it was shameful and should be illegal. And here was this professor telling us it was a good thing?… A less courageous man might have backed off, but that wasn’t in Manne’s nature.” Buckley has many illuminating things to say about creativity in the visual arts and literature, and readers will find learned discussions of, among other matters, Gothic architecture, the art criticism of John Ruskin, the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the style of Walter Pater. (The painter Ford Madox Brown is wrongly called “Ford Maddox Brown.” Brown, by the way, was the grandfather of the writer Ford Madox Ford.) The author’s philosophical knowledge and acumen are evident in his discussion of weakness of will. “What Socrates was denying was the possibility that we might know what’s good for us but fail to act on it because we’re weak willed.” On the view that Socrates opposed, “We might be problem drinkers, binge eaters, or drug users…. We know we’re choosing badly but lack the strength of will to stop ourselves…. Socrates didn’t agree. People who are weak willed are simply ignorant about their own good, he thought.” (See also the citations of contemporary philosophical literature on the subject, chapter ten, note 8.) He concludes the discussion by saying: “We don’t have to decide whether Socrates was right. But if he was, and if ignorance about the good is the root of all evil, the remedy is more curiosity. And even if he were wrong, we’d be morally improved with a greater curiosity about where we go wrong.” Buckley is well aware of the dangers of the wrong sort of curiosity. “Sometimes it’s rational to avert your gaze. There are things we’re not meant to see, such as public executions that are degrading to watch…. There are also the Holy of Holies that are veiled from our eyes and the forbidden games we are not meant to play. Curiosity killed the cat and turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt.” It’s surprising that he does not mention St. Augustine’s condemnation of curiosity in the Confessions, though the work is listed in the bibliography. Interested readers should consult the learned discussion of St. Augustine’s views by Hans Blumenberg, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Buckley has a fine sense of what Unamuno calls the “tragic sense of life,” and he speaks about our need to confront death and the possibility of an afterlife. He also has much to say of great value about Pascal and the Jansenist movement. It is clear that he has sought for what the book of Job calls “the inner deeps.” -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------