Seeing Things Differently -DanP the apologist excuse.

[Res Ipsa]

MG, this is exactly what happens when you superficially throw out concepts without understanding them. When you invoke constructionism, you forfeit any claim to any access to objective truth. Full stop. You cannot claim superior access by invoking God, or the promptings of the spirit. The entire LDS notion of access to the divine through promptings of the spirit is a social construction by the LDS community, starting with its founder and continuing through today. If you perceive something as a prompting of the spirit, that’s because of the socially constructed notion that what you are perceiving comes from some external source as opposed to any other internally generated feeling or emotion.

Constructionism does not include an escape hatch for believers. You're in exactly the same place as the rest of us. Any argument you make to the contrary can be dismissed out of hand as special pleading.

When you tried to carve out an exception for knowledge from a source other than humans, you confirmed exactly what Gadianton observed upthread.

If you actually understand the quotes you are cutting and pasting, then you should understand that the LDS “burning in the bosom” is a socially constructed reality, that the “whispering of the spirit” is a socially constructed reality, that “covenant people” is a socially constructed reality, and on and on. And the kicker is that you have no way of knowing how closely your socially constructed reality corresponds to objective reality.

Peterson and other LDS apologists have not done themselves any favors by resorting to post-modernism to defend their religious views. The same ideas and concepts they superficially deploy turn their claims to possessing truth into rubble.

Well said.

I need to add that Brooks is not saying what either Peterson or MG seem to think that he's saying. It looks like Daniel has selectively cobbled together some parts from chapter 5 of How to Know a Person to make a case that's completely different than the one that Brooks is arguing. That's disingenuous, at best.

Maybe read the book (or at least the whole chapter), MG--before you use it?

Good point, Morley. From Chapter 1:

I learned something profound along the way. Being open-hearted is a prerequisite for being a full, kind, and wise human being. But it is not enough. People need social skills. We talk about the importance of “relationships,” “community,” “friendship,” “social connection,” but these words are too abstract. The real act of, say, building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: disagreeing without poisoning the relationship; revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace; being a good listener; knowing how to end a conversation gracefully; knowing how to ask for and offer forgiveness; knowing how to let someone down without breaking their heart; knowing how to sit with someone who is suffering; knowing how to host a gathering where everyone feels embraced; knowing how to see things from another’s point of view.

The book sounds interesting and potentially inspiring. It’s Brooks’ response to the increasing percentage of Americans who express feelings of loneliness or isolation. It’s going on my to-read list.

[Res Ipsa]

MG, this is exactly what happens when you superficially throw out concepts without understanding them. When you invoke constructionism, you forfeit any claim to any access to objective truth. Full stop. You cannot claim superior access by invoking God, or the promptings of the spirit. The entire LDS notion of access to the divine through promptings of the spirit is a social construction by the LDS community, starting with its founder and continuing through today. If you perceive something as a prompting of the spirit, that’s because of the socially constructed notion that what you are perceiving comes from some external source as opposed to any other internally generated feeling or emotion.

Constructionism does not include an escape hatch for believers. You're in exactly the same place as the rest of us. Any argument you make to the contrary can be dismissed out of hand as special pleading.

When you tried to carve out an exception for knowledge from a source other than humans, you confirmed exactly what Gadianton observed upthread.

If you actually understand the quotes you are cutting and pasting, then you should understand that the LDS “burning in the bosom” is a socially constructed reality, that the “whispering of the spirit” is a socially constructed reality, that “covenant people” is a socially constructed reality, and on and on. And the kicker is that you have no way of knowing how closely your socially constructed reality corresponds to objective reality.

Peterson and other LDS apologists have not done themselves any favors by resorting to post-modernism to defend their religious views. The same ideas and concepts they superficially deploy turn their claims to possessing truth into rubble.

Yes, much of what we see and experience in the LDS Church is a product of constructionism. That being true…how can it not be, we’re all human…it then becomes a question of what is and what isn’t a product of constructivist workings vs. what might be a product of objective truth. And that’s a TOUGH one because, as you know, these ‘spiritual truths’ cannot be readily proved or transferred from one person to another. It becomes a matter of faith to a large extent.

I’d like to take a minute and talk about history and terminology. From what I’ve seen, as post-modernism rippled through different academic disciplines, it produced a ton of different isms. Discussing those “isms” gets tricky because the same isms may be used in different fields but may not mean the same thing.

From my reading (and someone please correct me if I’m off track), the main development of the terms “constructivism” and “constructionism” was in the field of education, where they were applied to theories about how children learn. Constructivism is commonly used to describe the theories of Piaget, who theorized that children take information and use it to construct reality. Oversimplified, education is not just wholesale transfer of information from teacher to student. Education should assist students in discovering new information and incorporating it into their individually constructed reality.

But the term “constructivism” is also used in other disciplines, including philosophy and psychology. One helpful taxonomy of constructivism in general that I read included several sub-classes, including:

Cognitive constructivism, which applies to Piaget’s educational theories;

Radical constructivism, which posits that people individually construct their own realities; and

Social constructivism, which posits that that the construction of reality is not individual, but is social through interactions with others.

In education, a student of Piaget’s responded to Piaget’s theories with a theory comparable to social constructivism. But rather than identify social constructivism as a sub-species of constructivism, proponents of this theory gave it a new name “constructionism.”

A taxonomic mess. Back to the excerpt from Brooks. The part of the text that Peterson quoted describes radical constructivism. And that is the most accurate term for the concept you discussed. I don’t know why Brooks used the term constructionism, as I haven’t been able to find uses of constructionism applied to radical constructivism. I’m guessing he discusses the social aspect somewhere in material not quoted by Peterson. At any rate, to avoid confusion, perhaps we should specify “individual” or “special” constructionism or constructivism for clarity’s sake.

Returning to your comment: I view all these “isms” as tools or lenses to aid understanding. But they don’t do that if one mixes and matches them in an ad hoc manner in a way that reaches a desired outcome. I think that’s what you are doing when you posit “spiritual truth” as something other than socially constructed reality. Through the lens of social constructivism, “spiritual truth” is a part of constructed reality and you have no way to tell whether it corresponds to anything in objective reality. If you’re going to apply constructed reality to everything except the one source of knowledge that you want to correspond to objective reality, then you’re simply engaged in motivated reasoning, employing and discarding tools as needed to get you to the result you want. Why bother? I’d happily agree that ad hoc mixing and matching of tools will you get you any place you want to go.

But that would make for boring conversation. And it couldn’t be honestly described as reasoning or a search for truth or objective reality. To steal one of the Dean’s terms — it’s just LARPing.

Individual and social constructivism sit squarely within postmodernism. Claiming that a reliable method exists of discovering objective reality is part of modernism. You can’t make a modernist argument work by appealing to postmodernism. It forces you into either special pleading or into watching the postmodern arguments you’ve been making dismantle the modernist idea you’re trying to preserve.

Post modernism is a real bastard. It will not help you defend the concept that spiritual truth gives you reliable access to objective reality.

It’s back to a certain sense of what I’ve already said that we don’t see the world through our eyes as much as we see it through our overall experience. And each of us entering the room (examples in the quote I posted) are going to have different perceptions that will result in various take a ways.

I would say that we incorporate new information into our constructed reality. The question of which has the most impact in any given case is contingent. For example, I would describe “shelf breaking” as an example of new information having a larger effect than experience (or, the reality constructed before learning the new information.

Your experience over a long period of time in the law profession is going to give you a different perspective on things that may conflict with the worldview of another. And to each his or her own. Too much time and effort is made to either distort someone else’s views or to try and demonstrate that one’s views are the only game in town. I’m not asking you in any way, shape, or form to accept or believe in the doctrines and principles of the CofJCofLDS. I can’t. We’re not two peas in a pod 🫛.

It may be that your training in law and the logic/reasoning skills that you have developed take you to a place in which the world is a courtroom and there is the defense and prosecution modus operandi that become the all important thing. That’s you (maybe, I don’t know that for a fact…I’m sure there is a touchy freely side to you also). I mean, that’s where you’ve spent a good chunk of your waking hours and life. Someone else may be coming from a different place with different eyes to see and ears to hear what they experience, interpret, and implement into a worldview.

That’s a reasonable guess on your part. But, in fact, I haven’t been a litigator for close to 35 years. My work experience isn’t as you describe. What I do is advise clients how to fix potential problems before they ever get to court. That’s a different skill set than winning a case. What I’ve done for most of my career is take a complex problem, dig into the facts in as unbiased manner as I can, figure out the most likely application of existing law that will apply, and advise the client of possible ways to address the problem and the likely result of each. Distorting either the facts or law is a guaranteed path to failure. So, I’m focused on figuring out the right (or at least best) answer — not persuading a judge or jury that I’m right.

I am, however, interested in argumentation. For me, it’s an effective way of testing arguments. It’s like a particle accelerator — smash two arguments together and see what happens. You see the testing. You don’t see the evaluation. So, your assumptions about how my experience has shaped my reality are understandable, but off base.

Still, we aren’t peas in a pod. I view the two of us as engaged in two very different projects. I see you as trying to construct a reality that is rational, preserves certain core assumptions about God, and supports your beliefs about Mormonism. I see myself as trying to construct a reality based on something like harm reduction. But my personal current stance towards God or Gods is not an important part of my reality. It’s changed over time and may change again.

I think your project is much harder than mine. Much harder.

Remember the book from years ago called, “I’m OK, You’re OK”?

I remember it. I never read it. I read its predecessor “Games People Play.” I think there’s helpful stuff in Transactional Analysis when it comes to improving dysfunctional relationships. We could probably use it to improve the quality of our interactions.

It’s true! I’ve come to believe that more and more. And in my case I think God looks at each one of us the same way as long as we’re being true to ourselves and others.

That’s an interesting shift in perspective from orthodox LDS doctrine. More universalist, I guess. That’s not to say that I’ve ever thought of you as an orthodox member.

The last year or two have, at least for me, made manifest the fact that polarization…”us/them”…are not getting us anywhere. Far left and far right ideological extremists are showing us that this way of living can lead to dangerous places. The same thing can hold true in the world of religious belief and/or non religious belief. Nothing is ever solved by taking an extremist position. Especially when elements of common sense and truth can be found in so many different places.

By different paths, we’ve arrived at the same place. Now, how can we make it better?

Religious belief is a matter of personal faith. It all fits in very well…in my opinion…with the quote I’ve been referring to over and over again. I’m not out for a ‘win’ Res Ipsa. I’m getting along in years, as are you. We’re both somewhat settled in our ways while at the same time remaining curious about the people and the world we live in.

I think concept of “winning” can be useful as an analytical tool. Exploring what would constitute a win in any given interaction might illuminate important information about our worldviews. I’ve never thought that a win for you in our interactions would be converting me to Mormonism. Or to any flavor of theism. And I’ve never thought that converting you to atheism or away from Mormonism. But I often have some kind of goal mind when I interact with someone here. Using a game as an analogy, the players can have win conditions that don’t result in a zero sum game.

That said, I absolutely support religious belief as a personal issue. I’m a staunch defender of the First Amendment, including the Free Exercise Clause. Where I oppose religion is when religious beliefs are imposed on others in ways I believe are harmful — especially when religion attempts to do so through the wielding of government power.

Be well.

Regards,
MG

You too.
[/quote]

[bill4long]

Having listened to Lar Nielsen's theory, I prefer the original Nielsen:

[Philo Sofee]

Having listened to Lar Nielsen's theory, I prefer the original Nielsen:

[Valo]

I have no interest in going down this track with you.

I think that's great. Why don't you go back to the original thread and try to get into the conversation's topic, rather than a meta discussion about the conversation -- (can the conversation ultimately tell us anything since everyone is living a different reality)?

I'll tell you what, go back to the other thread and try to have a factual conversation and argue for your viewpoint. I wasn't participating in that thread before you derailed it, and I don't plan on participating. Try your best to come up with an argument that doesn't involve relativism (getting out of the argument) and I'll stay out of your way. In fact, I'll leave you alone completely on every thread you participate on here so long as you're staying on topic and not derailing it with an appeal to relativism?

Haha, you are threatening a poster that if they don't participate how you want you are going to harrass them?

That's pretty dark.

[Morley]

I think that's great. Why don't you go back to the original thread and try to get into the conversation's topic, rather than a meta discussion about the conversation -- (can the conversation ultimately tell us anything since everyone is living a different reality)?

I'll tell you what, go back to the other thread and try to have a factual conversation and argue for your viewpoint. I wasn't participating in that thread before you derailed it, and I don't plan on participating. Try your best to come up with an argument that doesn't involve relativism (getting out of the argument) and I'll stay out of your way. In fact, I'll leave you alone completely on every thread you participate on here so long as you're staying on topic and not derailing it with an appeal to relativism?

Haha, you are threatening a poster that if they don't participate how you want you are going to harrass them?

That's pretty dark.

Offering to buy your kid an ice cream each day that they can avoid biting other kids on the playground is not 'pretty dark'

[Gadianton]

Haha, you are threatening a poster that if they don't participate how you want you are going to harrass them?

That's pretty dark.

True. Isn't it marvelous?

but tell me, Velo, why do you bother to point it out? Are you offended that MG irritates me more than you could ever hope to?

[yellowstone123]

MG 2.0 wrote:

"I cannot get inside the minds of those that have a worldview that may not completely dovetail with mine."

Yes you can if you understand that we are the product of natural selection with bias and illusions built into our brains over time to promote genetic proliferation. Most suffering is caused by these bias and illusions and meditation and mindfulness can help alleviate it.

For more information read or listen to "Why Buddhism is True" by Robert Wright. Try doing both to understand his very clear and valid points of view. He's an evolutionary psychologist who teaches at Union Theological Seminary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Wr ... ournalist)

MG 2.0, I apologize. I'm short tempered with Mormon apologetics. The book mentioned is a great book and the writer has great thoughts. Perhaps in the next five years you might have time to read it.

[malkie]

nevermind

[Valo]

Haha, you are threatening a poster that if they don't participate how you want you are going to harrass them?

That's pretty dark.

True. Isn't it marvelous?

but tell me, Velo, why do you bother to point it out? Are you offended that MG irritates me more than you could ever hope to?

Q0 Depends on your point of view.

Q1 Because I saw it and I felt like it.

Q2 No but now that you mention it, maybe I should be.

https://youtu.be/EfqlWfZulJY?si=ektImdnu7BBLXqtW