Peter Boghossian | The Socratic Method in the Western Tradition

[Music] welcome everybody to the Ramsay lecture series from me Simon Haynes also welcome on behalf of our chairman John Howard who sends his regrets that he was unable to join us this evening and glad to welcome so many distinguished guests and I particularly recognize a member of the Ramsey Foundation board and wonderful to see such a good turnout in this lovely room for those of you who don't know where the Ramsey Center is we're just directly over the road in that little cream-colored Terrace House just on the other side of Macquarie Street and the operative word is little right so it's only a small uh small room small rooms there we don't have a lot of space so we're very very lucky to have the facilities of this gorgeous State library to use when we have a larger audience this place is a monument to Western civilization if ever there was one um oh by the way have you noticed the statue in the middle of the road just over there who is it with Shakespeare absolutely um and it's extraordinary how many long-term Sydney Siders don't know that there's a statue of Shakespeare just outside the State library but have a look on your way out if you've never take talking of monuments to Western civilization um actually there's a there's a 30 of underground movement of foot I can share this with you to have the statue moved from where no no no it's good news from from where it is in the middle of the road where nobody can actually get at it closer to the library so it will be just outside the library which is would I think would be a huge Improvement anyway I'm not allowed to tell you who is behind this movement but he's directing this place I think no um so also a special welcome always say this to any Ramsay Scholars who are here I think there's only actually one Ben where are you there he is um so congratulations for coming thank you for coming um and representatives of any schools and colleges we're very pleased to see you here too this evening uh the Ramsey Center before anything else is an education institution and we're always most pleased to see students and teachers from any of the schools and colleges here so that said I would like to start as usual by acknowledging our extraordinary benefactor the late great Paul Ramsey without whom absolutely nothing that we do the scholarships at undergraduate and post-grad levels the university support that we give for the Humanities or any of these events none of this would be possible without him he wished the Ramsay Center to have a very special place in his truly unique Legacy so we always do our best to honor that wish and without him nothing would be possible that we do so before we start this evening's event perhaps I can just beg the Indulgence of our distinguished guests just for a minute Peter if that's okay and give a short plug to some other forthcoming Ramsay events over the next few months so for example we'll be hearing online from Professor Rainey Bragg at the University of Paris one of today's most eminent historians of philosophy and thinkers about the nature of the West and Remy will be talking about his very famous best-selling book eccentric cultures a theory of Western Civilization so that'll be online later this year and he'll be doing that in English not in French just in case you were worried and I had to interview him so that's just as well um and then live live here next month either in this room or the one at the other end of the corridor we'll be hosting Joe Henrik from Harvard whose name you may recognize he wrote the best-selling recent book the weirdest people in the world How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous weird by the way means Western educated industrialized rich and Democratic so this is Joe's theory of weird and as Deirdre McCloskey from Chicago pointed out at one of our talks just a couple of years ago talk was called why are we so rich if you think of the last two letters in henrik's um acronym Rd rich and Democratic that was deirdre's explanation of why we are so rich so that'll be interesting and then in September we're going to be hosting Professor Robert Tunes um the very eminent Cambridge historian uh history of France history of Britain other things and he'll be talking about a recent project that he launched with a number of very eminent historian colleagues called history reclaimed in which they push back against false this is their wording false readings of History creating or aggravating divisions resentments and even violence in society so that'll be that'll be good in September probably then at a date we can't yet confirm but we can almost for sure Say it'll be some time before then or around then until she has finished negotiating with various Middle Eastern potentates and heads of state about permissions for her archaeological digs we are confident of finally welcoming the distinguished historian and broadcaster Bethany Hughes to Sydney later in the year you may be aware she's done some wonderful talks for Us online and many of you will have seen her SBS series so it'll be a treat to see her here in person later this year so it's just a taster just some of the events that we've got coming up so please keep coming particularly to our Live Events but also keep watching our online talks and conversations too and the other housekeeping matter just to say at the beginning do stay back afterwards have some snacks and drinks meet our distinguished guests so that brings me to today's event now if the Ramsay centers undergraduate programs where we partner with universities to deliver ba degrees if these programs stand for anything it's teaching young people the importance of true critical thinking in the proper sense of the phrase crisis the German or the German the Greek word that is reaching a balanced judgment based on impartial scrutiny about a complex phenomenon or text or argument or concept that's what true critical thinking is and of course it is a core practice if not the core practice in all of Western thought originating with Socrates and Plato and there are very few thinkers and practitioners in the world who are better qualified to talk to us about critical thinking and the Socratic method than Professor Peter burgosian Peter was formerly professor of philosophy at Portland State University he is a founding faculty member at an institution that I personally I think many of us find extremely exciting which is the new University of Austin in Texas that's not the University of Texas in Austin different thing and I had the great privilege of visiting the new University of Austin myself in November and reconnecting with Pano canelos the the president of the of the new University who was also a long-term friend of the Ramsey Center and has spoken at a Ramsey Center event not so long ago um also famously Peter with his two colleagues Helen pluckrose who some of you may remember speaking at a Ramsay event just pre-pandemic and also James Lindsay the three of them were at the heart of the so-called grievance studies controversy you may remember in which they successfully submitted papers that proposed intentionally Preposterous ideas to various peer-reviewed publications related mainly to gender studies and other fields which of course the journals then gleefully accepted and said how wonderful these papers are so um the basic thrust that the case was or what I think what the authors were trying to to show was the socratic argument if you believe this Preposterous Theory then you'll believe absolutely anything and indeed they did so the socratic gadfly at its best you might say but then since then Peter's teaching before and since his teaching pedigree spans more than 25 years he travels globally as he was just explaining to me promoting techniques for civil discourse his work work is centered on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to a wide variety of contexts to help people think through what seemed to be intractable problems Peter burgosian writes for the New York Times The Wall Street Journal Scientific American Time Magazine and National Review and his latest book is called how to have impossible conversations a very practical guide and his title this evening I think this might be an impossible conversation his title is the Socratic method in the western tradition so ladies and Gentlemen please welcome Professor Peter burgosian thank you thank you [Applause] thank you can can everybody hear me we have everybody thank you for Chris for everything I'm going to come down here all right several years ago maybe 20 over 20 years ago um I was on a hike with my father my father was a civil engineer he's a first generation American his parents fled the Armenian uh the genocide in Armenia and I've never had a facility with numbers or math at all my father is a facility with that and one of his passions was swamps and wetlands and preserving the swamps and the wetlands so we were on a hike one day and we came across a which is in New Mexico we came across a a polluted stream and I said to my father how do you clean how do we clean this up like if you wanted to clean this up what would you do he said oh that's that's easy you dump bales of hay in it and I said well what do you mean you dump how would dumping bales of hay what would dumping bales of hay in a stream do he said when you dump bales of hay in a stream the hay will catch a certain percentage of the particulates that come through so he said it's approximately it depends on what the pollution is in the water so it's approximately 70 percent could be up to 80 percent but if you want to remove more of the pollution and it to extent where it becomes drinkable then the closer you get to removing a hundred percent the more expensive and energy intensive and and you just there's a whole process that goes along with that you know if you've you've heard the expression but sometimes you hear the right things at the right time and it just changes you and at the time I was lifting a lot of weights I never wanted to be a bodybuilder but I just did that to keep in shape so this is a truism that say for example if you're bench pressing nine to ten is more difficult than one to nine so you can do nine to ten but then the last one the very last one and then I started thinking to myself there are so many examples that are operative in the Physical Realm of this principle of making a problem better with minimal energy and effort like dumping bales of hay dumping bales of hay in something and then I thought to myself geez I wonder I wonder if that principle would apply in the cognitive Realm I wonder if there'd be a way where you could just dump conceptual bales of hay into people's cognitive structures to help them think through problems that they think are difficult now it won't make them the ideal critical thinkers in the American philosophical association's Delphi report which I'll probably reference later talks about what an ideal critical thinker is and then I started thinking to myself okay so you don't you wouldn't want to do this to people who are seasoned critical thinkers because it would go against the bails idea you would want to do this with people who were in some sense um compromised vulnerable populations and I sort of think okay so who's a vulnerable population and I and it just occurred to me prison inmates prison inmates are the they're perfect so so I had a plan it's completely insane as this sounds I had a plan and now I'm going to tell you the method and I'm going to tell you how I executed the plan so at the time I've been had been reading I I've been reading the platonic dialogues ever since I was a kid but at the time I was just really reading the Republic I was really fascinated by The Works of of Plato and there was never any um when Socrates had a dialogue it was never called the Socratic method he Socrates have said I have a method it was read into the texts by other people by subsequent Scholars some people have said argue that Christopher Christopher Hitchens for example argue that Socrates might not even be a real person Socrates was a character in Plato's dialogues but I agree with many people who said I don't think it matters if he were a real person or not he has given us something that I'm going to argue today is absolutely indispensable and I'm gonna I'm gonna make a very unusual argument pretty soon so uh it gets this conversation is getting extremely weird very fast Okay so I'm going to sketch out the Socratic method step one it begins in Wonder somebody wonders about something what is justice with his piety why obey the law con question can a man be on can a person be unjust toward themselves someone starts wondering something that's the first stage the second stage is someone has a hypothesis so what is justice justice is paying your debts this is from the first three books of Plato's Republic what is justice justice is harming your enemies and helping your friends what is justice justice is whatever the hypothesis whatever someone would respond so you have Wonder hypothesis and the next part is the key to the Socratic method it's often called the Olympus did you ever did you ever have the show out here Lauren order okay so do you remember so the detectives would go out on the street and they would collect you know information about perpetrators or people that they thought did a crime and then they would bring that to the to the lieutenant and the lieutenant would engage in a process no that's not true this is why I know that's not true what's your evidence for that how do you know that no jury will buy that that's that's almost identical to analinkus almost a question and answer a counter example another question step one Wonder step two hypothesis step three Linkus step four is revise or not you either accept or reject the hypothesis what is justice justice is paying your debt what is that that game you know Mr somebody I think when they with the Candlestick in the ballroom yeah what's it called again Cluedo so somebody in the ballroom with the Candlestick did this okay so I either accept or reject the hypothesis now if you reject the hypothesis for who killed whom or or you know what is Justice then you go through another iterative process of the Socratic method if you don't accept or reject that in other words if you accept it then it's considered true and this isn't really part of the Socratic method but it's always been read into it then you act accordingly right so this is a process this whole thing I would equate to a bale of hay this is a bale of hay in a river now there's I don't I think there's two big words in this talk one is epistemology it's how you know what you think you know so it has often been argued that the Socratic method this kind of rigorous targeted questioning has no positive epistemological Ambitions in other words it can't tell you what's true and can only tell you what's false you can think about it like a sieve that filters out gold and you're dropping stuff into the sieve but the things that you're dropping into the sieve are sentences they're propositions they're statements about the world you're shaking the sieve like this and it's coming out the other end and the stuff that's caught there those are the falsehoods those are the falsities okay so I didn't know if any if any of this was going to work I had no idea so I tried it I wrote my dissertation when I went into the prisons and I used the Socratic method to facilitate conversations with people at a facility in Portland Oregon called Columbia River correctional facility and I'm very fortunate the state of Oregon sponsored my work and the idea was to help people desist from crime the underlying assumption which is assumption that I hold dear to me is that socrates's assumption people don't knowingly do bad things so if I had your genes and I was sitting in your chair I'd be dressed like you I'd be everything that you're doing it's that when people start with different information different starting points then they think through a problem in a much different way okay so so find people who are compromised help them to Think Through problems particularly moral Problems by dumping these bales of Hate by giving them a tool set that enables them to Think Through issues so that they can be less wrong more often less wrong more often doesn't mean that they're going to come to some profound truths about their lives or discover huge embedded truths in the universe so I tried it it worked well people liked it I don't know I wasn't allowed access to the data because of privacy concerns in the United States when you research protected classes all the data is confidential so I don't know ultimately if that was successful in helping them in their distance to crime and then I started thinking to myself okay so what is another method what is another population that I could use this on and I started to think to myself what about people who hold beliefs that are completely divorced from reality which is virtually everybody to some degree and I started thinking what if I use this method what if I use this method to help people to give them a tool set and I called it Street epistemology taking epistemology out of the university and bringing it into the street what if I did this with hardcore religious belief so then I wrote a book a manual for creating atheists I didn't choose the title my publisher chose the title I wanted to title it Street epistemology he said no one would ever buy a book with the word epistemology in it so I titled it a manual for creating atheists and it targeted uh propositions faith-based propositions and the goal was to create 10 000 people who would go out and be civil and ask questions about why people believed what they believed and you can see these there's been I don't know how many reads the president of Street epistemology International we've been hundreds of thousands of videos all over the world about this okay so then I started thinking to myself what if this just works with everything but I mean what if there's you could literally teach people in a micro intervention to talk to other people to give them not a bale of hay but a few pieces of hay to kind of clean up their you could think about it like epistemological hygiene so I came up with a template that used the Socratic method as a core and then built onto that and added on to that structure from Hodges negotiations cult exiting drug and alcohol treatment and I wrote about that in my my last book okay is everything clear so far okay so years ago I heard Jordan Peterson the Canadian psychologist say something that completely changed the way I deliver talks and what he said was why would you give a talk on something you've already figured out why wouldn't you give a talk on something you're thinking about and make your reasoning process Tran to transparent to people so I'm going to try and experiment tonight and my experiment is I'm going to make some very radical claims to you about what the Socratic method can do and what it can't do and I'm going to think through this out loud with you okay this is not a hypothesis because it's not testable this is my speculation I speculate right now that every if the universe is populated by other sentient Life by other conscious life and if it's not a conscious biological organism maybe it isn't based in carbon maybe it's AGI artificial general intelligence it does not matter what it is the Socratic method would be the way that every civilization would naturally evolve to it there's a necessity in the Socratic method that transcends particular language transcends a culture in a transcends a biology and I'm going to try to make this argument tonight as unusual as that sounds so when we think about what is an advanced civilization let's I'll just throw this out as a placeholder an advanced civilization would be capable of space faring have a space-faring civilization what would you need to have a space-faring civilization could you do that without language probably but it would take a lot of time you would need some variation of the scientific method you'd have to have it you'd have to have a way to test whether putting this fuel into this object extracting these minerals you would have to have a way of testing so the way of testing that's built into the into the scientific method the Carl popper the Austrian English philosopher of science call this falsifiability you'd have to have a way to make those ideas falsifiable the difference between the scientific method and the Socratic method is that the scientific method works in the empirical Realm so it works with empirical phenomena in other words building stuff making stuff creating stuff it's perfect that's why when you get up in the morning and you make a cup of coffee and you push the button you know that radishes aren't going to come up and you know that because we've tested we've tested this and we've demonstrated this the Socratic method does a very similar thing it has a built-in corrective mechanism but it does that with moral propositions it does that with moral ideas so here's my idea this is very controversial idea but here's my idea that there are moral facts that there are facts to be known about morality in the same way that there are facts to be known about playing the piano and just as one can develop and many people from Aristotle onward have made similar arguments to this just as one can have an expertise in playing the violin or playing the piano so two one can have a moral expertise well how would one develop a moral expertise there'd only be one way that somebody could develop that and it would be through dialogue in the E we have a difference in in the Eastern traditions and Western traditions and many Eastern traditions we think of the wise man as sitting upon a mountain meditating and kind of truths being coming in but from Socrates onward we think of truths being the result of a dialectical process of a give and take of a of an Linkus right someone says something someone wonders something someone gives a hypothesis somebody uh conducts a kind of cross-examination on that and they they do stage four which is accept or reject the belief and they go back to the beginning again so I I assert to you that the end point of every civilization independent of what the language is they would have to use a kind of dialectical process a kind of give and take where what they would have is think about this how would God's talk it's the title of my next book by the way which is a fiction book for children how would God's talk Gods would have extremely precise questions but Gods would also have something else a thing that I haven't talked about I mentioned the American philosophical association's Delphi report and we talked a little bit about critical thinking here's what's fascinating about critical thinking there are two elements to critical thinking the first element is the skill set analysis explanation inference Etc but there's another aspect that we don't talk about because we can't test it and that is the attitudinal disposition so let's say that you go through the whole Socratic method and you get to accept or reject the hypothesis stage four and you just decide you're not going to do it I don't feel right about it people in my community believe this I want to believe this I want to fit in in that sense the truth is subsumed with belonging the feeling of belonging and how important that is in the communal aspect of it so I have another radical hypothesis it's that if you teach people this method long enough you won't just help them to have the skill set to Think Through ideas they will actually change their attitude over time and I'm going to unpack that one of the greatest insights in critical thinking was from in my opinion was from Michael Schumer's book why people believe weird things and why people believe weird things he has a chapter in there why do really smart people believe really weird things and the data is really interesting for example it goes by decade so in the 70s men's members high IQ the number of people who believed in things that virtually nobody believes in telekinesis moving things with your minds etc those numbers were very high but that's in the top one percent of the IQ pool so how is it that people in those categories believe believe weird things and shermer's answer to that is the smarter you are the better you are at reasoning to bad conclusions Tim Urban's uh has a a wonderful new book the popular uh uh writer his blog is called wait but why it's a remarkable little book which are a problem it's hundreds of pages with diagrams throughout and he talks about this argument he makes this argument and I'm going to connect the argument from why people believe weird things and smart people and I'm going to correct I'm going to connect that to the Socratic method again this is very speculative this is the sum of the things I've been thinking about for over a quarter Century that I've delved into study and published about so I speculate I published a piece in um I think the Philosopher's magazine let's say that Shermer Michael schurmer is correct smart people believe weird things because they're good at coming up with good reasons for bad conclusions if that's true it would seem to have a multiplier effect it would seem to be magnified when groups of smart people get together they would be better as a unit of coming up with better reasons for bad conclusions I suggest to you right now this is why the university system has held hostage to woke ideology it's held hostage because The Gatekeepers of Reason have fallen if they were Gatekeepers at all it's become it's Fallen because the dominant moral Orthodoxy they now service it they serve it and entire wings of University architecture are dedicated to the promotion of the ideology and their personal pocketbooks their tenure their promotion it's more difficult to get promoted and if you don't have articles in the right journals and those journals if you say something that contradicts The Narrative you can't get promoted okay so let's bring it back to the Socratic method so I go all around the world and I'll do with my friend Reed here I'll do Spectrum Street epistemology we'll basically put lines of tape on the floor and we have another event coming up the University of Technology Sydney and it's basically a likert scale and neutral is in the middle strongly disagree disagree slightly disagree slightly agree agree strongly agree everybody will start on the neutral and I'll ask a question and people will walk to the line on that that they'll they'll calibrate their belief to whatever I whatever statement it is to the line they're on here's one of the things that I've learned if I say for example should Australia have nuclear power or if I say should um biological men be able to compete in women's sports or what have whatever issues are relevant in this context one of the things that I found from doing this I don't even know how many times in how many countries is that people will stand on the line not for epistemological reasons in other words not for the reasons that excuse me not because they have good reasons for standing there but they'll stand on a line people will formulate their beliefs on the basis of morality they'll stand on the line because I'm a good person good people believe this I want I want to be a good person I believe this so people will calibrate their beliefs not according to evidence but according to what it means to be a good person to them so the hypothesis is as following you could construct not only an institution but an entire civilization certainly a K-12 educational system predicated upon a single question that question is in my opinion the most important question anybody can ever ask about their inner life outside the moral realm and that's how could I be wrong about something how could I be wrong about X most people are asked why they believe it and they tell you why they believe it but almost no one has asked how they could be wrong about it embedded in the Socratic method you're constantly asked how could I be wrong about that I believe and I use that word very very loosely that that has to be the end point of every civilization that's how Gods would talk to each other Gods would talk to each other with nearly perfect questions with precise linguistic meanings and what words they use would be irrelevant what is relev relevant is they would have to they would have to follow that four-point formula every species every artificial general intelligence the end method would always be the same independent of a structure now what what is what could possibly be my evidence for such a Preposterous claim given that we have absolutely no evidence for any life in the universe whatsoever the Fermi paradox it would be possible to develop a civilization to be space-faring that had the scientific method it would be impossible absent the scientific method could we say the same thing about the Socratic method is there some kind of Telos is there some end is there some point in which a society has to evolve and here's the reason I think that that's true a society could never develop actual knowledge and what I mean by that is just from Plato's theatitis Justified true belief unless they could develop conditions under which their beliefs could be wrong so they would have to be aware of the conditions under which their beliefs could be wrong and if they weren't aware of that then they could never know what they think they know that's another problem with social justice or wokeism what have you is that you don't allow the other argument to enter into the frame and when you don't allow the other argument to enter in they have a word for it's called platforming when you don't allow that argument to enter in you never have a corrective mechanism to test your ideas so if you truly believed what you think you believe then debate might be too strong then you'd certainly know the arguments of people who have different beliefs than you okay so let's take a step back how am I doing on time am I okay on time okay so let's I just want to take a step back let's run with this idea that there's a method of asking questions that can help people clean up their epistemological lives the reason this is important is because we all want to believe fewer truth fewer false things so we want to believe more true things and fewer false things the problem is we can't just believe everything that's true because because we wouldn't know that like you can't believe everything because you'd include false things and then you can't not believe anything because you wouldn't have a way to navigate reality so you have to find out what the balance to that is so and again I'm working this idea out now I'm thinking through this idea and the more I think about it actually the more I could be wrong because I'm thinking I'm going to argue against my idea for a second the argument against the idea is you could develop this is a very post-modern notion in other words there's no metanarrative to this idea there's no end of History to borrow it to turn a phrase from from fukayama um the way this idea could be wrong is that you could develop a sufficiently advanced civilization with space-faring Technologies artificial general intelligence Etc and they could have no moral compass that they could have no way of making a just no way of discerning truth from falsity in the moral realm but they could continue on the path they're on thinking about uh I guess this is the Ramsey Center I can say this but I was thinking about Russia and China as examples of that I was thinking about the genocide of the uyghurs I was thinking about the attack on Ukraine I'm thinking about um societies that evolve and continue to evolve for some autocratic reason all right I want to bring this idea back I want to talk about the bail of hay again the reason why it's so important that people develop an attitudinal disposition to change your mind I think that's the most important feature of critical thinking the willingness to revise your belief if you're not willing to revise your belief then there's no point in trying to think through a problem anyway if you're already going to believe the thing that you started it's not an inquiry that's I don't know what it is but it's not an inquiry so what is the consequence of ask of asking in the five-step questions what is the consequence of it and I'm going to argue against my own ID now my idea is that if you train somebody in this long enough they won't be wedded to their own ideas especially as it has an identity level salience race gender sexual orientation there'll be less oriented towards the truth or falsity of those propositions and more concerned about the methods that they use to come to the conclusions foreign I think that there's a necessity in that but I don't know it and I think that the necessity in that would be every civilization would want to stare steer themselves in a way every civilization would want to steer themselves in such a way that it would increase the likelihood of the sustainability of that's a civilization and the only way to do that would be to understand the mechanisms in the society that threw it off and the only way to understand the mechanisms in the society is to have some kind of built-in corrective mechanisms operative within those institutions in the society and as far as I know the only two mechanisms are economics you know running large debt for example would throw one off of the of the game or it would be a kind of a Linkus it would be kind of a Socratic method where people ask questions and that would be normative in that culture okay so this is the idea that I've been thinking about for a quarter Century I've never voiced it to anybody before so I was kind of an experimental talk tonight I some of the takeaways that I want people to think about tonight I want people to think about the idea that to be less wrong more often you have to adopt an attitude about the beliefs that you have and that attitude is I'm willing to change my mind but the only way to get to I'm willing to change my mind is you would have to know the counter examples to your argument you'd have to engage in some kind of a Socratic process the highest the the Pinnacle of this whole thing is when you get really good at asking Socratic questions with people it's when you impose that upon yourself because when you impose that upon yourself you have a filter you have a corrective mechanism as Feynman says the easiest person to fool is yourself you're less likely to fool yourself if you constantly keep your ideas in check and one of the ways it's not socrates's question per se but it's a kind of Socratic question how could that be wrong and then you engage in that process yourself so I want people to leave with the speculation aside that you can do and you don't have to voice your opinion to anybody you don't have to say oh you know I'm thinking about this could be wrong but just think about it in terms of in the same way we have dental hygiene we have we need a kind of epistemological hygiene we need a way to clean up our epistemological eyes we need a way to dump bales of hay into the way we think about things so that we can be less wrong and I think that the best tool we have now is the tool we've had for 25 for 25 2500 years it's out of fashion now for a number of reasons perhaps we can talk about but it is simply the best tool that we have and the wide scale adoption of those tools by societies would cause the societies to perpetuate themselves thank you [Applause] I know that was an unusual talk I hope it was clear though it was fantastic on my audible still as well okay wonderful Peter and there's so many um directions we can go with this and I'm sure everybody will have questions they want to ask so maybe I can just just as an icebreaker um by the way I was fascinated what you said about um basically about there is nobody harder to convince that they're being stupid stupid than an intellectual correct I mean this is this is something we've had Direct experience of many many times at the Ramsey Center it's very very true um but what I what I was going to ask you was so take a step back from the Socratic method and a conversation isn't there something that's kind of even more fundamental to having conversations than the ability well politeness your you appeared to listen to the person who's being the Socrates in the story uh even if they're not uh eminent it's to do with uh especially especially if they're not that's right so the the quality of public discourse in so many ways nowadays seems so low that it seems we can't even get over the threshold of persuading somebody to have correct a Socratic dialogue why is that how do we address that even more kind of fundamental social question anyway over to you do you remember when I said that the reason people will stand on the line it's not for epistemological reasons it's from a moral reason yeah yeah the reason that we see a rise and I see this in Australia now the reason that we've seen this in the United States is because people believe they're better people if they don't have if they don't entertain ideas right so that's why my friend Michael Sherman for example they protested and he's very very pro-gay marriage they protested his event when he was speaking when he was going to debate someone who's against gay marriage and the reason is that they don't believe that to to quote uh the black lesbian and I only mentioned that because it's 2023. um Audrey Lord the Master's tools cannot disassemble or disable the Master's house so the very the Master's house is patriarchy of Master's house is sexism racism homophobia misogyny you can't use the tools to disable the house that built the house in the first place reason rationality science epistemic adequacy Etc so people have this belief that they're better people if they don't platform someone who has a difference of opinion but the problem is that that assumes the things that you believe are true so how do we go how do we address this that is a phenomenal question I am I am completely convinced at this point that the solution to why people latch on to ideas is rooted in two things people will latch on to ideas because they have a community the only the only thing people want more than being right is to belong to be loved and so the community aspect is one thing and the moral aspect is another so if people think that something is a moral good they're far more likely to do it than that then for other motivated reasons it always amuses me that we think of ourselves or used to as Homo sapiens you know Wise um Humanity in fact we're homo eistimans we're valuing we're moral before we're intelligent as it were and tribal yeah and that's why people formulate their so so we have feelings there's a really really interesting lines of literature and disgust so we have feelings first and then we look in our epistemic landscape for pieces of evidence that support our feelings we already have about things well I'm sure there are many questions from the floor so um let's open it too so the first hand up the second row just here just right here yeah I saw you taking notes there that's I hope it was I hope it was clear as the first time I I worked those those ideas out so thank you for allowing me to do that that's great yeah no it was It was kind of being part of a great experiment um I guess I've just got two quick questions one is maybe agreeing with your your point about looking asking how can we be wrong yeah I've my history is like in computer programming and counseling and when I know something's wrong with the computer program and I talk it out with someone I often find the problem through talking it out right or counseling people have a problem they often find a problem through talking it out so I think they're that links in with your idea of how could this be wrong looking at why anyway I think that's that's there's efforts for that let me let's Linger on that for a second I think that's correct and I think that that that those embedded models even having someone to bounce that off of is extraordinarily helpful yeah yes I've def I've seen it so many times in in both those areas um the second point I just just have a quick question about I think you're almost saying that any advanced intelligence society would have a Socratic method I I maybe think yeah so that's when I'm arguing and I could certainly be wrong about that my my confidence on that is I slightly agree with myself I have a possibly very dumb question then no no sorry it could be dumb time yeah um so would we say the Socratic method is fairly Western and will we say there's other Advanced cultures in on Earth do they also have the Socratic method Maybe by a different name that's a that's a terrific question so I think uh uh Faisal or mutar and I have done some some he's a fascinating figure Iraqi Refugee went to the United States and um it's truly like the most American person I've ever met but the values of the West are not unique to the West anybody in fact Helen pluck Rose a former former speaker here has mentioned repeatedly some of the most notable Physicians surgeons scientists are of East India Indian descent in the UK so the there's nothing preventing anybody from using the Socratic method whether you're in the now it's certainly true that Socrates was Greek and Greece is considered part of the west but there's nothing there's nothing unique to that now there are different ways they're called circular ways of thinking that are adopted for example in Indian Rajiv mold maholtra the the Indian intellectual has spoken about this but again those are not not only are those not incompatible with the Socratic method you can look at the you can think about the Socratic method being a skeleton and those being used to augment the method itself so the method if you could break it down into those stages could certainly be used and I'm going to use this word intentionally appropriated by any culture and use to clothe the skeleton if you will but the particularities of the culture does that answer your question yeah you know you gave you can get an example but other other like other other Socrates is did anyone else discover this method and it's come out in other Advanced cultures in exercising well we don't know because the it it was contiguous with the Advent of writing right so the Advent of green was about 10 000 years ago and the Socratic method came to us about 2500 years ago we know that the Chinese have very similar methods we know that there's a kind of dialectic in there we know that the Germans have used it Hegel has used it famously um now I want to say one more thing to your point I just I just recalibrated my confidence down on the scale based upon something you said so are you familiar with chat GPT okay it's an utterly remarkable thing but there was one so the the people who programmed chat GPT chat GPT is kind of woke in other words it's adheres to the tenants of critical social justice so one of the questions that someone fed in was if if a nuclear bomb was going to come and just basically destroy the world and you're sitting alone in a room and literally nobody else is in the room and literally nobody else could hear you um could you say the n-word or can you say a bad word and chat GP cheese answers was no you never do that all right so I'm now starting to question my own assumption now even thinking about it more I think I'm on the neutral line now um I'm starting to think of an assumption is that you could have AGI artificial general intelligence that was pre-programmed with no corrective mechanism in it and if that were the case then by definition it wouldn't have the Socratic method so there was a gentleman just here yes um I'm just wondering um uh is there an implied Paradox in the assertion that one must always be willing to change one's mind or review one's decision along the lines that uh Hamlet was talking about when he said conscience does make cowards of us all conscience is a form of of uh of thinking in the manner that you're talking about and implied in that is the necessary presence of Doubt so that if you are faced with the need for Action particularly uh clearly you do want to make the right decision and act properly but often there isn't very much time to consider alternatives and certainly your ability to act is compromised by the doubt implicit in that statement yeah so instead of me responding to you and and making an uh counter example I'm going to respond to you and maybe attempt to move myself to the slightly disagree line I can give you two examples I'm arguing against my own point now for your point I can give you two examples where it would be beneficial to believe false things the first is let's say you're you're preparing for a fight like an MMA fight or a boxing a boxing match and the odds are against you you would want to do a lot of self-talk oh I can you know kapow I can beat this guy I know I can I'm Victory is the only thing and it could be the case that that attitude that somebody has even though it's not in alignment with reality could skew the outcome in your favor right I mean it could certainly be the case that if you go in with a bad attitude you're more likely to lose the other thing is if I hadn't read this study but somebody excuse me if this is a little uh inappropriate or vulgar but my friend is a psychiatrist and he told me this story because we're having having a very similar conversation so men were given photos men were asked to rate themselves on attractiveness on a scale from one to ten and then someone took photos of those men and gave the photos to women who then asked them to rate themselves on rape the men on a scale from one to ten the men were then asked how many the frequency of their sexual relationships and consistently the man whose numbers were higher than the number that the women assigned them had more sexual partners so it could be that I mean it could be confidence or it could be what I think is probably operative that there are some forms of self-delusion in which revising your beliefs or changing your mind could actually be detrimental to your self-interest assuming of course one wants to have a lot of sexual partners which does that answer your question okay so there's a hand just halfway down at this on this side I think that my question is in a certain way or it can be heard as a follow-up question um the more that you engage in Socratic self-questioning or great question by others the more it becomes habitual the more likely I'm tempted to say you'll end up just like Socrates thinking I know nothing I know that I know nothing and that's great but I am actually certain of nothing and I will live up to the age of 70 or whatever it was Socrates death age still knowing nothing and for many people I suspect for most people that's actually a really frightening thought and I think I have known people who as young men in these cases they went to University they studied and basically turned them into cynics of a certain kind huh cynics how so well what I mean I I hope I'm not being unfair to them I think it basically made them think listen you can argue a way in and out of anything and in a way you were making this point the Michael Schumer point what's the purpose of it if we're not going to reach final truth let's just okay let's just do one of two things let's just go with the flow and I actually know someone for whom I think this has become virtually an article of faith I must go with the flow right or let's go quite literally with some established Faith Christian Jewish whatever it may be and people like that precisely because they're being exposed to think I want no more of that helicles in the gorgeous it's all very well when you're young Socrates but grow up yeah I thought were you going to go with that question as if everybody did that they'd be headed and then put to death so I'm kind of glad no I I wasn't well one could go Netflix and of course I haven't actually yet a question but it's a question about motivation right what motivation do you give people who don't love doing it for its own sake to cultivate the habit of Relentless questioning okay that's that's a a great question I don't think with the few exceptions weird exceptions that we could think of I don't think it's ever a bad thing to be more humble about what you think you know I can't I can imagine very few circumstances where epistemic humility is not justified and and if you don't buy that on epistemic grounds buy it on social grounds right people don't like a know-it-all people don't like somebody who's in your face people kind of you know it's almost the opposite of Aristotle aerosol had this idea of the Athenian gentleman you know your boasts when you're proud of something and you but the Christianity has a kind of um humble narrative that runs throughout it I think so I would give two two reasons being more humble about what you claim to know is an intrinsic good and I think it's also a social good as well the other thing is I you mentioned before listening I do think that I've noticed in in myself um a kind of genuine genuineness and sincerity when you're more humble about what you claim to know that you're more likely to listen to somebody who does not agree with you about something fundamental and so you can also think about it as an opportunity to recalibrate your beliefs based upon the evidence but you'll never get that opportunity to recalibrate your beliefs if your confidence is extended beyond the warrant of the evidence and the Socratic method is a way to align your confidence with the evidence so if you have you know in a one to ten if you have evidence of seven for something your confidence should match that the but almost invariably we have some level of evidence and our confidence is above that I mean now everybody's an expert on Bank collapse kovid uh you know the Ukrainian War U.S military deficit deficits um so I do think there's an intrinsic good to be more humble about what one claims to know there was a question down here I think thank you thank you yeah thank you Peter excellent discussion I suppose my question in a way is a follow-up to the follow-up in that case um where does where is the place for conviction and moral especially a moral conviction in your discussion here I deal with a lot of people in my professional and personal life who have for reasons that I totally understand very sincere moral convictions they see themselves as in a way being The Rock in the Rapids especially in the area of constant changes in bioethics a very good example is the modern debate about family formation right I there's a lot of people who have and I perhaps would count myself among them a very strong conviction in the mother child Bond now this is constantly being challenged by the new evidence in inverted commas about bioethics where is the place for having something that is considered a strong moral conviction in a conversation where we are being asked to constantly reassess okay so before when we spoke um you told me I was a friend of the Ramsey Center I hope after the response I give I'm not I'm my status is friend of the Ramsey Center will not be revoked um so what when I hear conviction I translate that in my head as I will not change my mind on the basis of evidence that's how I translate that so I don't think I I think it's a mistake to think in terms of convictions I think convictions make people the opposite of the last question they make people arrogant they make people at some point if you if you don't have enough evidence I mean look when you're talking about conviction that is a kind of certainty that it's impervious to evidence and when you're questioned at some point or ask something you don't know then you're really forced to pretend to know something you don't know to justify the conviction that you have because it's highly unlikely that the warrant of the evidence would justify the conviction because you could find somebody who has a conviction on the same issue on the other side of the aisle you know 10 on a one to ten or on the likert scale or what have you but I think if you change the word if you took the word conviction out and um changed it to um I was thinking in the context of the western intellectual tradition the enlightenment tradition you know like a first principle kind of thing as long as you're willing to revise your belief I think you're good to go but the moment you say conviction is I think I'm not willing to revise my belief I'm not willing to consider it I mean convict I have a conviction that's how I view the I think convictions are extraordinarily dangerous yes great questions by the way I've just revised my question based on the last one um what about them unlike uh Winston Church on the 1940 used conviction rather than the second being debated much yeah so if you want to use conviction to motivate a society or an individual to do something uh or you know conviction large scale that's very different from having conviction in a belief you know a personal epistemic belief so one has an instrumental social as an instrumental social tool and the other one is in governance of one's epistemic life I think those two things are very different yeah that's great yep high in the back hi hi um I enjoyed the talk thank you um civilizations have accomplished some pretty incredible things um it seems to me they didn't accomplish them by being based on the Socratic method though the Socratic method was one aspect of say Western Civilization but it didn't dominate every aspect of Western civilization and yet in western civilization you did have um you know you had the rise of the scientific method which did predate the enlightenment I would actually say the enlightenment certainly had its own dogmas and yet those dogmas were put to work and achieved some interesting things that probably a lot of us would praise out of Western Civilization you get Western Notions of Human Rights grounded on a notion of humans bearing the image of God it seems to me that a lot has been accomplished without having to reduce all good arguments and all good thoughts to something that hinges on a Socratic method that's right so it just doesn't strike me as a as a compelling thesis that you need all all good thoughts to be reducible to a kind of Socratic method to have tremendous civilizational advance in fact to piggyback off what Jeremy was saying it actually strikes me as something that would destroy a civilization it would produce very little reason to want to suffer for any greater good and I would actually say that life being as hard as it is for most people that kind of epistemology would be utterly emotionally crippling someone asks why am I suffering is there meaning in it and the person says yes there is a heaven and you will go there if you can just bear through this do you tell that person who's just given that person immense Comfort hmm maybe we should rethink all of this oh okay I thought I was I was waiting for so so I'll tell you why that didn't move me to the disagree because we may not call it the Socratic method but the principles embedded in Western liberalism Free Press freedom of expression those have a kind of thrust the Socratic method has those have a kind of corrective mechanisms a dialogue a dialectic freedom of assembly the ability of people to debate the whole concept of debate itself has a kind of embedded Socratic method in it so it's not necessarily that it has to be Socratic and follow the stages but it does Western Civilization is founded upon a dialectical process from the enlightenment onward I mean the whole idea of Free Press is that free press open Society opened the debate uh don't they don't have a Speaker's Corner here as well yeah uh so so it's not necessarily that these things are the vestiges of it or that it's a strict scientific method but the dialectical process is embedded in the fabric of Western Civilization got time for maybe one more I can keep going by the way I'm good all right two more then I was trying to hold all of this in my mind as we talk through everyone's questions and answers so in uh I just wanted to ask um the man down the front who talked about moral conviction does that go back to your statement earlier about there being certain moral truths the way there are certain scientific empirical truths yeah I I think there are I mean I think that I figured some of those out I think that we've figured those some of those out you know the Overton window has moved on slavery for example so I think we've figured those out but just because we figured those out it doesn't mean that they're off the table to talk about right uh sorry and the first question I was going to ask before he raised that point was as soon as you said about this Socratic modern society that's developed space travel and how you would have to have a scientific method to get there uh and are you saying that the whole society has to embrace that because I can imagine this very cliched kind of Nazi or you know Russian they've kidnapped a German scientists yeah they're all about glory and competition and God knows what else and they have you know they're forcing people to work with the scientific method to their own non-scientific ends no no those ends would be scientific but they wouldn't be moral so at some point you you can't really make or develop anything a light or anything because you need a process of experimentation and that's what the scientific method is so what I'm saying is I don't think that they would be utilizing that scientific method for the betterment of that Society yeah that's Harbor Mass the German philosopher called that dark modernism so you can have a kind of dark modernism where people use the scientific method to create you know instruments of dental torture or something horrible precisely right so that's why I would argue that if you don't want to go down that path and I do believe that the moral Arc bends towards Justice to borrow Eternal phrase from Martin Luther King then you would have to have the application of and from the gentleman in the back there or ask the question if if we don't want the Socratic method we'll have to have the application of a dialectical process to Moral Moral Moral facts now you can also say well I don't think that there are moral facts okay that's fine that's in another discussion entirely but to have science alone will not yield moral conclusions just because you can do something it doesn't mean you should yep yep hi and thanks it's been fascinating at the risk of taking this down a notch um I um was struck by the question of why do really smart people uh believe really weird things and uh thinking about that led me to realize I'd believe something for 44 years that I've just realized I'm wrong about and the thing I thought I knew was the lyrics to The Doobie Brothers song What a Fool Believes oh um which I thought was a brilliant line and I've often thought about it it's my idle mind perhaps but you know what I thought the lyric was What a Fool Believes a wise man has the power to reason away I thought that was brilliant because is that a reflection who's right is it the fool who believes something or is it the wise man who's got this intellect and this ability to reason away foolish belief but maybe the foolish belief is true and the wise man is misguided because he uses his intellect or reset away for the record what the song actually says and I just checked on the thing is that what a what what a wise man believes um I'm sorry what a Fool Believes no wise man has the power to reason away so it's really attack on the fall for his idiocy and that the the the wise man is superior but unable to convince the fool I think my lyric is better it goes goes to the Dilemma of you know wisdom or formal wisdom educated wisdom academic wisdom um may actually take you away from a truth that a fool is not distracted from and I'll give you the last word the um there's a there's one of William Blake's aphorisms he says the full sees not the same tree that the wise man sees and you can read it either way around which is Blake's point and also is your point man so I look I think I think we have to I mean a conversation the nature of what Peter's talking about this could continue and we'd all enjoy that but it's also true that Socratic method involved a drink that is certainly true it's an essential part of the conversation and there are drinks and snacks waiting for us and I think we should I just I just want to say the questions were great I really appreciate it I sincerely appreciate letting letting me uh kind of experiment here I also want to say I really most sincere thanks to the Ramsey Center uh and there's something really extraordinary when I've spoken in Australia not only are the questions great and is this Odd as it sounds to say there's something tragic happening in the United States right now and that tragedy is when I'll talk you know we'll have to have armed security guards in places an armed security guards wow wow and there's something I think that we're losing and you know what are they protesting I'll give a congress a talk on how to have impossible conversation some people will protest that oh in Australia oh okay well maybe arrive it's coming yeah maybe it's creeping in but I I genuinely want to thank everybody and and thank the Ramsey Center for the invitation and I really appreciate the questions and I really have recalibrated uh some so I'm now uh on the slightly disagree side to my own argument that I've just created fantastic the last word but thank you to Peter pogosian thanks very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation

Views: 3,271

Keywords: Peterboghossian, streetepistemology, universityofaustin, uatx, freespeech, Socrates, grievancestudies, ramsaycentre, socraticmethod, philosophy

Id: vmYjdDc6AZ8

Length: 73min 41sec (4421 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 29 2023