Yes that is true, and I think a good idea. But if you know, yourself, that you are below average in bricklaying, or even just average, it might be best to let the people who are best vote.

Yes, I do think there is an obligation to be an informed voter, if you vote, but it is implausible to me that you ought to vote no matter what.

I also say, in the conclusion, that it is up to the individual to judge.

I'm not sure what the bird professor did wrong. Did he ignore evidence he should've paid attention to? If he checked what he was supposed to check, then it seems like he didn't do anything wrong. If it turns out his theory is not true, them's the breaks, right? Such is the fate of man that our theorizing is not foolproof.

Perhaps the hospital company has an obligation to provide brick-laying lessons to everyone. You don’t need to be an expert brick layer, you just need to know the basics. Their will always be differences of opinion on what shape the hospital should be in. Some people will want the walls to have 90° angles. Others will want 30°. Some may even want curved walls. But as long everyone knows how to lay a brick, the hospital will stand.

Officially? It’s a fine. Not a big one - it’s like a hundred n fifty dollaridoos. Really the penalty for not voting is getting a worse society-a less structurally sound hospital in OPs tortured analogy

Please keep in mind our first commenting rule:

> Read the Post Before You Reply

> Read/listen/watch the posted content, understand and identify the philosophical arguments given, and respond to these substantively. If you have unrelated thoughts or don't wish to read the content, please post your own thread or simply refrain from commenting. Comments which are clearly not in direct response to the posted content may be removed.

This subreddit is not in the business of one-liners, tangential anecdotes, or dank memes. Expect comment threads that break our rules to be removed. Repeated or serious violations of the subreddit rules will result in a ban.

This is a shared account that is only used for notifications. Please do not reply, as your message will go unread.

The problem is that voting is about opinions and political philosophy about knowledge. Ofcourse ”politics” is merely a petty little play as we know it. It has no equivalent in philosophy.

What’s the penalty for not voting chez toi

Thank you for your thoughts. I appreciate the feedback.

I do not mean 'false' when I say 'wrong'. A better interpretation would be 'not true' which does not necessarily mean false. 'Wrong' would include half-truths, part-lies, and the like which I wouldn't necessarily consider false. However they are not true or correct so therefore I use the word wrong.

I think there is some confusion on the application of the razor, and what it does and does not entail. I'll make an example:

Say I studied birds as my profession. Say I found a new species of bird and developed a theory explaining its behaviour. For thirty years I wrote books, gave lectures, and made publications promoting my theory. However, after thirty years, a study comes out with new evidence that completely debunks my theory. I feel embarrassed for spending thirty years of my academic life promoting a theory that ended up wrong (not true).

In this example, I did not use the razor. What I should've done is consider if there was a possibility that my theory was wrong and then analyze that possibility. I could've discovered that there are holes in my theory and that it could be wrong. That way, instead of spending decades promoting a wrong theory, I could've readjusted my understanding earlier and found what was true earlier.

In this example, something could be seen as true if by denying it one would look like they are denying the entire understanding of the behaviour of this bird.

This razor could be useful in debunking conspiracy theories. Often in conspiracy theories, they rely on possibilities of malevolence. However, if you analyze the possibility, you will find that the possibility of non-malevolence being much more likely and fundamental to what we know to be true about a certain person's behavior.

Thank you for your comments and feel free to ask me any questions.

I think participants in society have an obligation to be Informed as well as an obligation to vote.

Of course I live somewhere where voting actually is a legal obligation and I’ve seen how much that’s improved our political discourse and participation compared to places with optional voting.

So from a utilitarian standpoint I just can’t see any way to support non compulsory voting.

We possess obligations to the others in our society being a somewhat informed voter is one of them.

Tell me how to place knowledge inside your brain without you having to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch something.

The problem is, you can't tell that to uninformed people. They'll react insulted and feel attacked in their personal rights and vote possibly worse out of spite.

Reposted this, because I had a question in the title. In this post I argue that there is not an obligation to vote, and that uninformed people should not vote. I do this by arguing from an analogy of building a hospital. I defend the analogy, and try to draw out implications of it.

I like Aristotle's view on this, its like trying to find the starting point of a circle.

I read the article and I'm disappointed by how abstruse the whole thing is. I don't mean that paradoxes are difficult to contend with, more that the authors seem to do their best to muddy the waters of what's being discussed in the first place. After the first few paragraphs they seem to be engaging in an exercise that's all together different from explaining the topic. I'm of the opinion that a convoluted explanation is worth less than a straight forward one.

Lets talk about category theory, lets talk about nested statements. Hell, I'm game to play games. But to obscure what you mean in an exposition that amounts to plate of spilled spaghetti is just a pet peeve of mine.

Heidecker v Wareheim was also a classic

Thank you for posting this article. I enjoyed Dresser's essay, especially since he did a good job of recognizing the virtues of both Heidegger's & Carnap's thinking. I've always leaned more toward the Continental philosophers but have studied and appreciated the Analytic approaches (esp. Wittgenstein). This article rekindled my interest in both for the first time in years. Cheers.

Interesting. So "wrong" in context pretty much means "false." Certainly your razor looks quite unwise. The claim that "When I make an assertion, it may seem right in my head, but sometime in the future someone may disprove my assertion" requires some unpacking. Do you mean like for every assertion? There are assertions that are not possibly disproven (in the sense of being proven to be false). I suppose any true assertion is such that it's not possible to prove that it's false. It is true after all. It can't happen that in the future there is some argument out there that makes it seems like it's false. But that's a different thing.

The phrase "possible way the assertion is wrong" seems to suggest a different idea. Perhaps you have in mind different interpretations of a single assertion? On some interpretations the assertion is false, say? There are two things: (a) a more or less clear single assertion and its future vicissitudes vis a vis efforts to prove its falsehood; (b) a vague or ambiguous assertion, its various disambiguations, and various efforts to prove the different interpretations false.

The only "truth inherent to language" is that it is language, and so is the word "truth". Modern philosophers who were ignorant of physics, and postmodern (or neopostmodern) philosophers who wish to ignore physics, try valiantly to formalize some metaphysical mechanism or method which would allow language to ascertain truth rather than simply enmatter truth, and continue to fail in that regard.

Paradox remains suspect by those philosophers because they desire truth (and metaphysics) to be bound by logic, which provides a precision and consistency of computational validity, and this seems, to them, the only reasonable meaning for truth. But being need not be described to be, and remains ineffable for that reason. The truth is that paradox (logically irresolvable conundrums) are far more meaningful than any tautology (which can be defined as anything which is not a teleology or a paradox), and understanding them, not resolving them, is the proper approach to reasoning. There is an unavoidable paradox intrinsic to the ineffability of being, which is indistinguishable from any other properly formed paradox in reasoning, and identical to metaphysical uncertainty: the unknown is just as unknown as the unknowable.

You're not even arguing against me right now. I don't deny the importance of reflection or reason. I am simply defending the claim that all knowledge is first derived from the senses.

Also, you could argue that, sensibility exists without reason, when you take a look at the animal kingdom. Whereas reason CANNOT exist without the sensibility. Imagine you're born into a world cut off from all the senses; impossible, since there would be nothing.

Thus it follows that sensibility is the independent and reason the dependant, it wholly relies on the subject to be able to perceive through sensibility.

> The assumption here is that most people will be comfortable and halfway knowledgeable of themes being treated.

True, but there are several other variables involved, one of which is how people respond to specific language/style that is used during conversation.

Not a big deal, just thought it was possibly interesting.

The assumption here is that most people will be comfortable and halfway knowledgeable of themes being treated.

Of course if every man was their own independent separate island, you'd have a far more tentative and shy approach.

Agree (I think?)...but I'm thinking more along the lines of something like diplomacy...but not in terms of getting people to like you, or necessarily agree with / adopt your ideas, but rather from the perspective of getting people to even consider your ideas. (But of course, this can take away from the fun/ease aspect.)

I hope this makes some sense, some ideas are difficult to communicate.

"Harsh" in the way you can interpret it. You totally understand it how I meant, or it won't click at all, like a semiconductor (and nicely enough, another user below took up on the possible incomprehensions)

Not "harsh" from a point of view of respect.