can we ever get rid of personal desires when making an argument?

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- Absurdist
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can we ever get rid of personal desires when making an argument?
OP - October 26, 2011, 04:42 AM

i think one of the problems of philosophy is that we tend to be invested in something or another. for example when people argue against cartesianism they have a desire to believe that there indeed is knowledge out there that we have access to, and they therefore try to find arguments in support of that desire. and likewise a belief in cartesian egoism might justify one's belief in dualism and therefore in the soul, at the cost of the belief in knowledge.

so the question is, is there any way to get rid of our desires when we make an argument, or are we always stuck with them?

do we have a desire to not believe in god? does a belief in the abrahamic god not force us to do and believe things we do not wish to believe?

and if we believe in something not based on our own desires, does that make it any more true? and how can we find something not based on desires... and how can we prove it's not based on desires?
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Re: can we ever get rid of personal desires when making an argument?
Reply #1 - October 26, 2011, 04:49 AM

i have never been more personally invested in any paper as much as i am in this one. i need to do whatever it takes to argue for public knowledge and against carestian solipsism, and i know i'm doing it on purpose... i know it, because otherwise i'd go crazy. it's the ultimate test for me. and it's driving me crazy how much i'm invested in this fuckin damn paper.

i do believe in knowledge but i also know i'm very invested in believing in it. i can't not believe in it... and the question is, does my investment affect my belief? maybe if i weren't invested in it i wouldnt believe?
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Re: can we ever get rid of personal desires when making an argument?
Reply #2 - October 26, 2011, 08:15 AM

Quote from: Abood on October 26, 2011, 04:49 AM
does my investment affect my belief? maybe if i weren't invested in it i wouldnt believe?

OK, I'm a philosophical neophyte, but my 2p's worth:

Speaking personally, I think beliefs are fundamentally aesthetic choices; we find statements about the world (and those axioms we use in filtering such statements, for that matter) elegant or inelegant, pleasing or not pleasing (which to my mind also introduces indifference as a classification). To that extent, the truth of a statement is relative to the individual contemplating a statement; the rigour by which a statement is assessed becomes a matter of personal choice, and the consistency of our beliefs suffers or benefits accordingly.

To return to your question; your investment in knowledge is one basis from which you argue for knowledge, but I don't think disinterestedness in a belief is essential to argue for or against it. The principle of charity only suggests that you give the best possible interpretation of a belief before you can attack it, no?

Before it gets too late, you will find escape.
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Re: can we ever get rid of personal desires when making an argument?
Reply #3 - October 26, 2011, 08:40 AM

this might be a special case with cartesianism (or more generally, a priori argumentation), but when it comes down to it, it can never be disproven. one could always argue that everything we experience could very well be a deception and it just happens to be a very consistent one -- consistent both in the present and in the past. yet to me it seems meaningless and a purely metaphysical speculation. so what if we lived in our minds if for all practical purposes everything is consistent and there is in fact knowledge we can derive from this consistency? the only reason we can differentiate between truth and deception is precisely because we do have a concept of truth. if we were being deceived by descartes' demon, then the joke is on the demon, because he made the world so consistent that we don't even need to have access to whatever he's preventing us from accessing, this has become our reality.

and yet, even with that argument, it's still compelling to argue that access to the metaphysical really is important. i can easily write a paper arguing that regardless of how consistent this world is, it doesn't negate the possibility that it is a deception.

but i find cartesianism to be a figurative throwing hands in the air. it's as if the possibility that we are being deceived should prevent us from pursuing reason. it seems that as long as the world is consistent, that's enough for us to seek knowledge. it doesn't have to be metaphysical knowledge, but it's practical nonetheless.
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Re: can we ever get rid of personal desires when making an argument?
Reply #4 - October 26, 2011, 09:27 AM

Quote from: toor on October 26, 2011, 08:15 AM
I'm a philosophical neophyte, but my 2p's worth:

Most philosophers aren't worth a farthing, so fire away.

Quote
Speaking personally, I think beliefs are fundamentally aesthetic choices

Funnily enough I was thinking something very similar the other day, that the course of our life is dictated by a series of aestheetic choices.
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