Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Thu Feb 22, 2024 8:33 am
VA, you have problems with justification. You don't realize this. People react to it. Sometimes nastily. Sometimes probingly. Sometimes merely pointing out what is lacking. This has been going on for a long time.
Let me make a guess. I doubt you've been in rigorous academic settings where you could get feedback from a professor on your interpretation of texts and on making arguments (justifying). You may have logged into college courses online, but not as a student whose essays get feedback, where leaps in the argument are pointed out, where you've been given guidance in how to formulate an argument, how to use the ideas of other people in that argument and how to criticize the arguments of others.
One need not have any academic background to gain these tools.
One could get this through conversations with parents or friends who are also interested in ideas and willing to point out when your argument or interpretation is not justified. And who do these things well and/or are learning to with you.
I don't think you realize, because of this, how often your arguments are actually strings of assertions. I think this is why you need to use quotes from authors and AIs so often, because justifying is not a skill you've had help with.
You come to PN and meet abrasive responses and so you get defensive. So, the feedback you get about your arguments and lack of justification (not always but often) is dismissed by you as dependent on the psychology of the people you are interacting with.
This is a shame, because you are through this dismissal NOT learning how to improve justification and interpretation.
In this last week you put out positions that contradict your own positions at least as much as those of others, but you don't notice this.
You don't notice that when you respond to people, most of the time, much of your response is a re-assertion of your position.
In an academic setting or in discussion with interested peers or family members, this would be called out. Hey, you didn't actually respond to the point Hegel or Tony was making? Professors and friends, given that you need to respect them at least because they are friends or because your parents or you are paying good money to learn from them have suggested something. Here, they get dismissed as I sadly think (but do not assume) this will get dismissed.
It seems impossible in your model that people could actually be reacting to flaws in your reasoning (justification, interpretation) nor that these flaws are in some ways rather basic confusions on your part.
You can tell yourself that, really, I am saying this because I can't deal with the scary truths of antirealism (or whatever) or because I am a stupid or jealous or nasty person. Or whatever. And you can continue to assume that when people point out what they consider basic flaws in your whole approach to argument and justification, that really there is nothing for you to learn directly from what they say. You can do that and sadly I expect you will do that.
Or you could consider that at a basic level you tend not to have logical connections between your assertions in key places or in general in what you are calling arguments. You could decide to learn directly from others.
Of you can keep cutting off your nose to spite your face.
