Shot, Chaser, Meta-Chaser

 

how can anyone actually believe this? pic.twitter.com/xhb1vOWtMw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 11, 2021

"In. a matter of mere months, Joe Biden has brought this country to the brink of ruin." That's Stephen Miller, of course—the alliteration tells the tale. The Edgar Allen Poe of political speechwriting, in more ways, perhaps, than one.

Part of the answer should be obvious: you have to really want to believe it.

Streams of Story

Unidentified illustration from the Brittanica article on the 11th-century Kathāsaritsāgara ("Ocean of the Streams of Story") by Somadeva.

Frank Wilhoit showed up in the comments yesterday with some criticism I'd partly take issue with, but which forces me to note that the original post was a real soggy bloggy mess, structurally, about too many things at once, and I feel I really ought to pull it apart a little bit, to clarify.

Wilhoit wrote:

Dismissing Brooks has by now become a deeply-ingrained reflex. To be sure, he has earned that; but if you are going to quote him and try to refute him (which I have previously diagnosed as a poor use of your time), then at least spot his key words. This time the key word is "stories": and he has stumbled over something much too large and important for his limited comprehension.

"Stories". Not philosophy; not pseudophilosophy; not propaganda; not "lies": stories. Think that through, right to the bottom.

As far as Brooks goes, I'll say it again: I get a few different things out of playing with Brooks that I wouldn't want to give up, though I've slowed way down in recent years as his well gets dry. One of these things is just fun: because he's such a bad writer and bad researcher, it's easy to make fun of him, and satisfying because his social status is or used to be so high. 

But there's generally more to it than that, and I almost never mean to be actually writing about Brooks at all, but about the subjects he wants to discuss. Like anyone who writes, I write largely in order to find out what I think, and to inform my thought through the process, and I'm interested in a lot of things I'm not very well informed about at all. So is Brooks! Though not interested in the same way—mainly in elevating his status as a pandit or universal expert over the widest imaginable range of material, and too lazy to learn much of anything or to learn any of it right.

It's the Same Old Story

 

Plato and Aristotle, ontology and epistemology, red and blue, in the School of Athens: you can see a hint that craftsman Raphael had a preference.

In epistemology—the philosophy of how we know things—it's been commonly understood that there are three basic kinds of knowledge, best known in the 1949 formulation of Gilbert Ryle: 

• propositional knowledge or knowledge-that a particular thing is true (I know Oxford is in Oxfordshire);
• procedural knowledge or knowledge-how to do something (I know how to finger-pick "Gospel Ship"); and
• acquaintanceship knowledge or knowledge-of something that you're familiar with (I know the 1-train stop at Columbus Circle)

In today's column, noted epistemologist David F. Brooks ("How to Destroy Truth") offers a remarkable new picture in which it is possible to know something without knowing whether it is true or not, and reducing the types of knowledge to two.

Great nations thrive by constantly refreshing two great reservoirs of knowledge. The first contains the knowledge from the stories we tell about ourselves.

This is the knowledge of who we are as a people, how we got here, what long conflicts bind us together, what we find admirable and dishonorable, what kind of world we hope to build together.

Bret and Butter

Update: Now with a newly improved paragraph somewhere near the bottom!

The "butter" in the headline refers to the oleaginous tone with which Stephens tries to lull or perhaps lubricate the reader into acquiescence in his revolting project.

Klezmer band from Munkács, Hungary, in the Subcarpathian Rus' region, between the wars. From the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem.

Rectification Central welcomes Bret Stephens, late of the Wall Street Journal, to the pages of The New York Times, and his maiden effort, "Climate of Complete Certainty", which showed up online Friday afternoon. Shorter:

Hillary Clinton thought she was 100% right or thereabouts in the presidential election last November, and yet she didn't win. In the same way, global warming crusaders think they're 100% right, but there's a chance they could be wrong. Even the liberal Andrew Revkin agrees people would take it more seriously if you'd admit it might be trivial.

Yes, it's pretty dispiriting. It seems a lot longer than it really is, too, perhaps because it wanders so widely, and starts off with a rather lengthy epigraph:

There are more things in philosophy...

...Than are dreamt of in David Brooks's heaven and earth.

Harold Lloyd, The Freshman, 1925.

The old moral humilist is back from a brief holiday, somewhat refreshed and in some philosophically louche company, that of Christian psychologist Robert C. Roberts (Baylor University) and regulative epistemologist W. Jay Wood (Wheaton College). It's his more or less monthly book report, on a book by Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007).

And what, you want to know (don't deny it!), is regulative epistemology (if not a metascientific stool softener)?