----- Original Message ----- From: "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
> > Sure we do. I, in particular, know exactly what is right for
everyone.
>As I
> > once explained to Luke, who seems to be gone for the summer, my
views
>are
> > correct, ot I would not hold them. We just don't expect anyone else
to
> > agree, that's the difference. It's an important one, don't you
think?
> >
> > jks
> >
>==================
>
>Ah, the metaphor of holding a belief;
Yours, not mine.
==================
See your third sentence. Didn't you read "Metaphors We Live By" by Lakoff in Johnson or are you suffering another one of your bouts of literal mindedness :-) ?
the "right" to freedom from
>persuasion is one of the most interesting and often tragic
>contradictions of liberalism and illiberalism, no?
No. Liberals don't think you should be free from persuasion. We think you should be free from _coercion_. If you want to attempt topersuade me to support vouchers or be washed in the Blood of the Lamb or whatever, I have no right to avoid that, althoughI needn't listen or answer. What you don't have the right to do is is impose your religion on me using the force of the state.
=================
Like I said you are free from persuasion. See sentence 4.
The noxious
>historicity of political theory privileging an adversarial conception
of
>"the other" even as "it" tries to hold out a possibility human
>solidarity and sympathy.
That's the human condition, not political theory.
=============
There's only one human condition? A self-fulling belief dynamic; encouraged by legal discourse too. Most people most of the time manage to engage in non-adversarial, non-trivial communication. To say that there is some level of necessary adversarial communication in social systems and that we can't help having them lead to war, class structures, racism and sexism seems a monstrous failure of cognition. Political theory doesn't just passively "reflect" the societies it studies, it's partly constitutive of them. Or is the Constiution not the manifestation of a concatenation of theories?
Perhaps belief itself is the problem? And no I
>don't want to talk about the belief-desire thesis. :-)
>
>Ian
Well, I have no idea what you are talking about.
jks
=================
"Desire as Belief Implies Opinionation or Indifference" Horacio Arlo Costa, John Collins and Isaac Levi http://www.columbia.edu/~jdc9/daboi.pdf
or:
Stephen P. Stich, "Autonomous Psychology and the Belief-Desire Thesis" http://www.mnstate.edu/hong/PhilMind/eliminative.htm
I thought you were a philosophy of mind addict at one time...
Ian