Towards a Metapsychology that is True to Transformation - 5 (919nRmjhW2w)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=919nRmjhW2w

Yeah, we didn’t get that on tape. Welcome everybody to Voices with the Verveki, which is also part of the Cognitive Science Show. And this is another episode in Towards a Meta-Psychology that is True to Transformation. And I’m joined once again by my friends and interlocutors and co-examiners, Greg Enriquez and Zach Stein. Please say hi again, gentlemen. Hey, hey. It’s really good to be here. Likewise. Yeah, we’re about to commit the naturalistic fallacy and get away with it, I think. Looking forward. It’s what Colbert used to say. Right. And I’m ready to get the hell out of here after we do. All right, so we got into some deep but very clear waters, I thought, last time as we got into the dimensions of insolment and spirit and transcendence. And that took us into sort of the fundamental joint point between our ontology and our normativity. And that’s exactly where transformation sits. Transformation sits right on the joint point between ontology, your theory of being, and normativity, your theory of how one ought to behave, what it is one should do, how one is obligated, et cetera. And as we’ve talked about throughout, that has been an underlying theme as we try to articulate what we mean by transformation and correspondingly, what do we need as a meta-psychology to address that. So my job here, I guess because I aspire towards Socrates, is to make this very problematic and difficult. And then invite my friends to solve the problem. So here’s, I was taught, like everybody at my grandmother’s philosophical knee, that there was a couple of these unassailable conclusions that we had reached in the Enlightenment, typified by Hume and Kant. And then later, sort of developed by the beginning of analytic philosophy, people like GE Moore and Hume and Moore are the two people I’m going to zero in on. I want to make very clear that I’m making use of this really important book, Natural Ethical Facts by Case Fair. Because I haven’t seen any good attempt to refute or counter-argue what he has said. That doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, but I haven’t seen it. So what’s the distinction we’re talking about? Well, is ontology, ought normativity, it’s called the is ought distinction. And Hume basically argued that there is no argument that will lead you from the statement of facts, what is the case, to the statement of what one ought to do. Because there is nothing in the premises the statement of the facts that contains something from which you can deduce an ought statement. And that’s just, Hume made that as sort of a basic logical argument. And so what people have said is whenever you go from making a statement of what things are to drawing a conclusion of what one ought to do, you’re committing the naturalistic fallacy. And this is one of the ideas of modernity. And then that gets, I think this is proper to say, that gets reified into a distinction between facts and values. And they are completely ontologically of a separate kind. And no statement of fact will obligate you in any way to any statement of value, where value is taken to be not a preference, but some ought or something like that. So what that means then is ethics as a whole sits in this place and Kant basically argued that it’s autonomous. It doesn’t need to be grounded on ontology. He’s relying on Hume’s argument to do that. And so, and Habermas has pointed it out. We get what we get are these domains of normativity where we make judgments about what’s good or what’s true or what’s beautiful and they’re autonomous from each other. And so knowing what happens to be the truth, the facts has no bearing on how we ought to behave. Now, it was acknowledged there was a reverse entailment that ought implies can. You can’t obligate somebody to do something that they cannot do, right? That doesn’t make any sense. And so people have tried to sort of work a morality around that reverse entailment. However, like many of the sacrosanct distinctions given to us by the enlightenment and constitutive of modernity, this distinction has been under very significant criticism and even undermining for quite some time from various quarters. What I like about K. Spears’ book is as I get older, I prefer thin books and it’s thin and it’s clear and he concentrates on sort of the core arguments. Now, K. Spears’ point goes basically like this. I’m gonna use K. Spears to bring things into this distinction into question. So K. Spears says, well, Hume’s argument works if there is no missing premise, right? So if I say Sam murdered Peter and that was bad, well, why was it bad? Sam ought not to murder Peter or should not, well, why not? Well, and then what we typically say that Hume removes from the argument is because it’s bad or it’s good. Now, before we make the distinction, because if we’re just making the distinction, right? To make the distinction, we’re just arguing in a circle. Let’s say, what if it was just the case that it was true that certain things are good or bad, right? We can’t presuppose the naturalistic fallacy to defend the natural, right, to defend it. So what you need, right, is you need a separate argument as to why the statement X is good is not a natural statement, is not a statement of fact, is not the kind of statement that can be true or false. And what K. Spear points out is Hume does not offer because it does follow that, you know, Sam should not kill Peter, why killing Peter is bad and you should not do things that are bad. The last thing is taken as non-controversial, as a moral statement. So the missing premise is the contentious premise. Now, Hume’s argument therefore depends on another argument and they are often linked together, but what K. Spear shows is that it’s dependency relationship, not an association relationship. And this is Moore’s argument, because Moore’s argument was an argument designed to show specifically that statements about the good or goodness are not natural statements. That’s the crux of Moore’s argument. He was a brilliant book, by the way. He introduced the domain of inquiry that’s now called meta-ethics. We’re not making ethical statements, you’re trying to figure out the nature and the status of ethical states. And so Moore’s argument went like this. He said, well, whenever you propose to me a natural definition of goodness, so you say, pleasure is goodness. And then he says, but then there’s an open question. Are there not times when pleasure is bad? And people will say, well, of course. And then he says, well, propose another definition. And then you can see this almost being like a Socratic dialogue. Well, you know, helping people when they’re injured is always good. But isn’t it, aren’t there times when doing that could be bad? Well, yes. And then he says, look, you’re trying to make an identity statement, but every identity statement you make, I can call into question. And so what he said is, there is, right, there’s no, we can’t make an identity statement between any natural fact and goodness. We can’t say goodness equals X. Because whenever we posit it, we can ask a question. And so Moore’s argument is taken as establishing that there is no natural definition. And he actually came up with the phrase, the naturalistic fallacy. There is no natural definition of goodness. And then if you can’t put that premise in to Hume’s argument, then Hume’s argument runs and you can’t do the is ought thing. Case sphere comes in and quite rightly points out, Moore’s argument is dependent on two really questionable assumptions that weren’t in question at the beginning of analytic philosophy. Namely, that we can give definitions of things, that we can specify the essences of things, and that we can do that in a purely analytic fashion. And then secondly, that there is such a thing as a clear distinction between analytic truths, truths that are true by definition, and synthetic truths, truths that are true because we’ve gone out and done the empirical investigation. So Hume’s argument depends on Moore’s argument. Moore’s argument depends on definitions in an analytic sense, not in a dictionary sense, or in an empirical sense. Depends on essences, as to put it in a short. And it depends on the analytic distinction. It depends on that there are certain things that we could establish just conceptually, like the nature of goodness, just by trying to give it a definition. So is that okay so far as an… So what I’m trying to show is the dependency relations. That okay so far? Okay, so Quine actually has something to say on both of these, famously. So Quine says on the first one, yeah, I see why there can be essences, sets of necessary and sufficient conditions that allow us to give equivalent statements or identity statements, like a triangle is a closed sided figure with… He says, I can see why you can do those in math and in logic, precisely because they are semantically empty. They’re not actually making claims about the world. They’re just about… I don’t wanna use a lot of technical language. They’re purely formal concepts within a purely formal system. Gotcha. So the Quine says, but that’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about most of the things we wanna say there are essences. And then of course, he’s relying here on Wittgenstein, because Wittgenstein famously pointed out, and then Fodor did a lot of work on this in cognitive science because the standard model for concepts is that they are sets of individually necessary propositions that are sufficient for all and only the members that fall under the category given by a concept. So when I say a triangle is a three sided closed, straight figure, interior angles adding up to 180, all triangles will fall under that and only triangles will fall under that. That’s how essences are supposed to work. But let’s take, right? Bachelor. Well, what’s a bachelor? Well, an unmarried man. Really, that’s the definition. Yeah. So is Tarzan a bachelor? Well, no, you have to have access to women. So the Pope’s a bachelor. Well, no. Oh, so gay men are bachelors. Well, that depends on what we mean. And that’s the problem. And notice I now have to define religion, the papacy, access to females and also take into account what we’re discovering about the nature of gender. So these are things that have to be established empirically. These are entities you can’t just sort of define in and out of existence. So the problem is, and this is what Coyne went on to argue, the only meaning we can give to essence now is when I get a set of properties that give me the most powerful generalizations of my explanation. So gold has this essence because we came up with a set of properties that generalized to all the instances of gold, but we had to discover that empirically. We cannot conceptually come up with the atomic weight of gold, but that’s its essence. That’s actually the thing that picks it out reliably in a universal fashion. So Coyne basically argues that for the essences we care about, we have to establish them synthetically. We have to actually go out and do empirical investigation. So Moore’s argument can’t actually be claiming to be doing what it claims to do, which is disclosing the essence of goodness because he thinks that can be established analytically just from the meaning of the term. But the point is the essence of goodness has to be ultimately discovered in some empirical fashion. And those already we’re sort of, what, no, right? But let’s just keep following the argument. Then Coyne famously wanted to say in connection to that is the analytic synthetic distinction cannot be established in a non-circular fashion. Because basically whenever you try and establish a non-logical synonymy like bachelor and unmarried man, what you have to do is you have to presume that you can analyze all the terms down, which means you have to be able to show that you can find terms within, let’s say I’m gonna break down on, so bachelor and unmarried man. And then I have to get that the man within bachelor is synonymous with the man in unmarried man. How do I know those are the same? How do I know? Because it’s the same term, the same three letters. Well, that’s ridiculous. We have lots of homonymy and all kinds of things. No, no, what they mean is they both refer to the same thing. Well, how do you know that? And then, oh, because they both have the same definition. Oh, I’m back to, I have to know, in order to establish synonymy, I have to be able to carry out the analysis. And in order to carry out the analysis, I have to establish the synonymy and that’s a circle. And it’s a circle that depends on another thing that we can actually give Aristotelian essences to things. And both of those things are deep. This circle is, well, it’s a circle and it doesn’t give us what it claims to give. And it’s dependent on a presupposition that essences are established analytically. Now that was all very technical, but when you’re invoking the is, aren’t fallacy, you’re invoking a technical argument. I’m sorry, nobody established this other than by technical argumentation. So, and by technical argumentation, Hume’s argument depends on Moore’s argument. Moore’s argument depends on analytic definitions and the ability to establish analysis independent of synonymy and synonymy independent of analysis and you can’t do that. So Hume’s argument actually doesn’t go through. Now notice what I didn’t show. I didn’t show that you can just simply go from statements of is to statements of art. So let’s remember showing that something is not impossible has not the limited all the ways in which it is possible. Those do not, one does not follow from the other. Just showing you that a deduction from is to art is not impossible doesn’t mean that I’ve been able to specify where it is legitimate and where it’s illegitimate. It’s just, we can’t just do this carte blanche, judgment. So people, another line of argument has come out of the work of Nelson Goodman and Hilary Putnam and I’ll use some of my own work because it’s very much inspired by Goodman and Putnam. So I, for example, argue that all of our epistemic acts in so far as we’re trying to make some kind of knowledge claim depend on relevance realization. That you can’t make an epistemic judgment unless you’re doing relevance realization. But what is relevance? Is it a statement of how things are? Is it a judgment of value? Is it a description of how you ought to pay attention? Well, the problem with relevance is it hangs between all of those in a very annoying fashion, which makes it extremely problematic. It also makes it extremely for con for trying to build ontological bridges over epistemological swamps. But the point I’m trying to make, and Putnam and others have basically made is, the knowledge claiming machinery and notice what I’m doing. And the value assigning machinery are not these separate things. They are completely interdependent and inter-defining. And so we can’t pretend that we can cleanly separate them from each other. And for me, that’s just, I think, an apt description of the conundrum we face when we try to talk about this feature of information that is when we say it’s relevant. Doesn’t seem to be a feature of the information, but it doesn’t just seem to be a feature of our preference because we say things like, I should have paid attention there, that was more relevant, right? And we correct ourselves. How could we correct ourselves if judgments of relevance were purely preference or pure subjective valuation? So anyways, you’ve got a technical argument saying, Hume’s argument actually doesn’t run for some very good reasons. And again, you can’t say, well, those are all technical argument reasons because Hume’s argument is just a technical, deductive, logical argument. That’s all it is. So if you reject logical arguments for refuting the is-ought fallacy, you’ve got to reject the argument that establishes it too. And then on the other hand, when you in practice, try to do an ontology that will ground psychology, trying to keep fact and value independent from each other, turns out to be an impossible project. And I posit that that’s especially the case when we’re talking about something like transformation. So that’s me problematizing the is-ought fallacy in as concise a fashion as I possibly could, with much gratitude to KSPEAR and Tip of the Hat, to Putnam and especially Jerry Porter. Great, well, that’s a good summary. So again, I wanna just remind you guys what I said, showing that an is-ought inference is not impossible, does not delimit in what ways it can be done. So what I’ve left us with is I promise to do so, is I hope a question, which is, how should we see the relationship between is-ought and how and when and why is it legitimate to move between is and ought? Beautiful, so first of all, just either one of you have any clarification questions where they’re problematic? No, I think, I mean, for me at least, you clarified the analytic nature of the argument, you problematized that well, you articulated that, well, a particular angle on reality, like a recursive relevance realization angle, fuses fact value in particular kinds of ways that affords, that needs to be taken into consideration. So I’m fine with both of those, I’m fine with both of those, actually that parallels some of my own thoughts, I definitely am curious to get Zach’s rich take on this concept in your problematizing formulation. Yeah, it was great, John. I mean, it’s taking me back to when I was really looking at this stuff in a reading, I worked with Catherine Elgin, who was one of Nelson Goodman’s students. Oh, yes, yeah. And so she helped me think about this in the context of human development, specifically in education, specifically which are both two domains like psychotherapy, that actually for good practice require the blending of those two, right? But also for good practice require the keeping them distinct. And this is the thing I’ll say, which is that we don’t wanna throw out the baby with the bathwater of eternity, like the distinction of the value spheres, which you mentioned the Kantian, kind of distinction of the value spheres and Weber talks about it and Habermas kind of reifies it in an interesting way in the pragmatics of communication. That’s a pretty important innovation, which stops certain kinds of language practices, which we all instinctually rebel against as moderns, which is to say when someone applies descriptive language from a religious ontology like which, which is both an ontological and an evaluative claim at the same time, and there’s no opportunity to say, hey, wait, do which actually exist is a separate question from how do we value which is like, there’s no separation of science from ethical conversations. There’s a merging of the basically authoritarian forms of truth and traditional forms of truth with social practice and then like emerging up together. And so that was very important to overcome and actually change the nature of how we justify different types of claims, and that justifying an ethical claim is different from justifying a scientific claim. And this is actually where it gets tricky to say that certain things and that it’s true that something is good is correct, but it’s a different kind of truth, if you will, than to say X number of people have X number of cases of COVID, right? Very different kinds of truth. Now, I think it’s okay to say some is true that some things are good, but we have to be careful to think about what’s the evidentiary basis upon which we make that claim. And this is why Habermas, although he tries to overcome the differentiation that goes into disassociation and then retroactive like hegemonic dominance, which is what it’s, because it’s not just that they’ve become separate, it’s they’ve become separate and one’s the kind of weaker player, right? That it’s not just that Moore says they’re separate, he’s also saying this is basically irrational, like all the values stuff and these kinds of things we’re dealing with emotion, not reason. And in the long run, that’s where the conversation goes. And so that I think Habermas is trying to say, wait, no, it’s important to understand that the way we justify a scientific validity claim is different from the way we justify a normative validity claim. And we don’t wanna blur those, because if you start saying that, for example, and this is the problem in human development, right? That things which appear to be normal and can be scientifically shown to be normal are necessarily good. So deviance from them doesn’t mean they’re bad. And so we get mixed up, right? We talked about ADD and ADHD last time. And the question of like the scientific label of ADHD could be legitimately described as a descriptor to that child. Whether it’s bad or good he has ADHD is a different question. And this is where it gets very tricky, especially in the domains of psychology, the use of descriptive language, smuggling in crypto normative assumptions, and actually driving through normative agendas on the back of scientific data without having the normative conversation, separately distinct, but related from. And so as much as I want to blur that distinction, I’ll talk about Baskar’s fact value helix, which attempts to do that. You also want to maintain them as distinct and not smuggle all reason into the scientific truth stating category, and actually find a way to make as valuable and as important, which ends up being a form of moral realism, the discussions that we have about what value is. And that’s something that became very clear as I started to see the application of psychological models in domains like education, where you get this attempt to do away with the deep forms of ethical conversation that need to take place and replace them with scientific conversations, which is one of the problems. And it’s interesting to note that that’s the problem Kant was trying to avoid. Like Kant, he did the whole thing to save morality and faith from scientific encroachment. And he actually took those discourses more seriously than scientific discourses in the sense that he thought that they were primary to our being more so than the fact stating discourse. Not that they’re separate, but so I think that, yeah, there’s a deep retelling of the history, which has to do with not just the separation of them, but the separation and then the dismissal of half the equation. And so the resuscitation of the, and saying, hey, we can blur this distinction, means we actually need to resuscitate a whole discourse that we forgot how to have about the nature of value and not start having this discourse like we have scientific discourses, which is what evolutionary psychology does and a lot of other fields, where actually, no, you’re missing the point. Like the evidentiary basis for making claim that it’s good that something is true is not something we end up hashing out through statistics at the end of the day. And so this is a deeper conversation about the grounding of the normative, where it is and how it differs in aesthetics from ethics, from science, how they’re all related. So this notion of distinct, but inseparable is an important notion. And then the notion of the helix, which Bascar uses to resolve the problem, which is useful in psychology in particular. And I can get into that, because the other way places came up was kind of the other way, which is the claim that science is value-free in this conversation, which is the opposite mistake. And again, the helix is about that as much as it’s about other issues, which is that values frame scientific research. Right, like Quine took up philosophy for some reason, which has no evidentiary basis, right? It’s a reason from the life world of ethics and socialization and possibly even philosophy in the sense of like religio. And so one more thing I’ll drop in the mix was just the issue of measurement. And this is important to remember that so much of what got modern science going and what made it so kind of frightening to the piety of the Kantian ethic was the demonstrable power of using measurement with mathematics to model physical events and just how that changed the nature of the game very fundamentally. It was, yes, it was the experimental method, but it was specifically advances in measurement, which allowed for objectification and a different kind of possibility for mathematical modeling. And so what that means is that when we’re talking about is odd, usually when we’re talking about is, we’re often talking about some form of measured reality if you’re looking at the sciences. In everyday life, we talk about it’s that we’re not measuring, but we actually assume that we could measure them. And in the sciences, you’re looking at statistics and looking at other things. And so the primacy of measurement in thinking about the nature of ontology has limited us in thinking about what is ontologically real in these unmeasurable domains. And this becomes, I think, very important again for how do we ground normativity? Is the statement that it’s good that, that it’s true that that is good? Do we crash that out in terms of measuring some kind of? Mm-mm. And so, yeah, so that’s some of the stuff I’ll throw in there. And then there’s another conversation about this specifically in terms of development and the way the naturalistic fallacy has played out in human development. Most of the concerns people have about human development as a field have to do with the way the field has mishandled this issue, both cross-culturally and developmentally. And so we can kind of get into that at some point, perhaps later, but I will kind of leave it as my first Molly. Well, let me reply to that. Greg, you give me a couple minutes. Sure, of course. Yeah, no, lots of good, I’m nodding here. So, yeah, and again, I said, just because the distinction is blurred, it doesn’t mean that every move is licensed. I wanna state that one more time. But getting clear about the interpenetration. So for example, well, why should you believe things that are true? Why? What, well, why? Because truth is good. Why? Because it puts us in touch with what’s real. And that’s good. Realness is goodness. And Plato wrestled with this. Real is both a normative term and it’s probably your deepest normative term and your deepest ontological term. And yet you want an is, and this is what Plato, and that’s why he called it the good, right? And he didn’t mean ethical good. That’s a mistake. If you read Plato that way, you’re mistaking it. You’re being anachronistic. He was trying to say, no, when you go down these, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, you get to this thing and saying if it’s descriptive or normative, it’s both and it’s neither. It’s somehow real, realness somehow grounds all of our ontology and all of our normativity. And of course, one of the, you know, there’s an older tradition of seeing that therefore as, radically different, something fundamentally sacred. That’s the sort of move that Plato made for saying like, this has to be fundamentally different precisely because it’s the shared origin of both. And we’ve got to understand that that means our relationship to it. It is not the right word, it’s not a thing, but our relationship to it is not like in any of our relationships. It transcends both our most confident epistemic claims and our most confident normative claims. And then I see something analogous to this, not identical to this, people in like, especially in Dewey, in case we’re talking about Dewey, because pragmatism is a project that blurs the epistemic and the normative completely, utterly. And it’s paradoxical that most of the epistemic, where epistemology has generally gone to, I don’t think this is controversial. It’s largely pragmatism as the grounding is the epistemology. But in pragmatism, again, there is no fundamental distinction between truth and goodness. That’s the core of pragmatism. There’s a special definition given to goodness, and that definition is supposed to be also constitutive of how you seek the truth. I mean, this is clear in James. Perseus is a little bit different, I get that, but it’s clear in James, right? And so again, and this is what Pettenham’s argument is. We got, for all the excellent reasons, Zach said, we need to keep them apart. And Enlightenment had this wonderful, simple way, well, they’re just, they’re impossible to put together, so don’t even try. The problem is, you have the platonic critique, and you have the pragmatic critique, and in a weird way that would really bother both James and Plato, they seem to be converging on a point about, right, at the deepest levels, we can’t properly separate these two. And so this is just a way of refining the question in terms of what Zach said, and now taking it deeper. How do we simultaneously acknowledge what I would argue this case here is ultimately pointing to? He doesn’t get here, I’m taking it farther, that there’s this common origin. And this sounds like a developmental question, right? How do we reconcile the common origin with the needed differentiations? Did that make sense as, like, just, right? So taking into account what Zach said, and then I go deeper back, right, back into Plato and into pragmatism, and then come back out with, how do we manage that? And what is our problem? Like, in fact, this is a deep problem, right? There is some fundamental religio we need to have to realness. You know, this is one of Plato’s points. It’s a meta drive, right? Whatever else satisfies our desires, we have the meta desire that it’s real, that which satisfies our desires. Now, sometimes we fail to live up to that normative standard, but it’s very, very pervasive, right? I think I related to you, I do this every year when I’m talking about this in my one course. I’ll ask people, how many of you are in really deeply satisfying romantic relationships? Everybody, you know, most of the class puts up their hands, right, which is nice, right? And then I say, okay, keep your hands up if you would like to know if your partner was cheating on you, and that would completely destroy the relationship. 95% of the people keep their hands up. They don’t want all this happiness to be based on a fraud, right? And so we have some fundamental, and I don’t know what the term is, that’s the point. It’s not a moral relationship to the real. It’s not like, you see what I’m saying? It’s some kind of fundamental religio, and it grounds our ontological projects and our normative projects. And like I said, even the attempt to keep them, like trying to keep truth separate from goodness doesn’t make any sense. They need each other. They inter-define and depend on each other, right? Because if there’s no goodness in truth, you should, why pursue it? And if there’s no truth in goodness, how can you know about it at all, right? Like, so people have been making all of these points basically since Plato. And so now that’s why I wanna press it deeper. I wanna push this really deep. Sorry, but this is something that I’m thinking about a lot right now, because I’m trying to get these two notions that sit on this boundary, common origin of relevance and realness. Okay. Because one of the slogans, and please be charitable, it’s meant as a slogan, one of my slogans for what we’re trying to do in development is get relevance more and more coupled to realness. Our ability to, what we find relevant keeps us, right? Keeps us coupled to what’s real. Better and better, more and more. I mean more both quantitatively and qualitatively. I know that’s not enough, but there’s an important point being made there. Okay, I’ll shut up. I’ll offer some thoughts in relation. So, for me, obviously I’ll put it sort of in a Utah frame. So on the one hand, we have the issue of lived experience and the nature of lived beings, which I would argue, the nature of lived beings fuses is an odd. I mean, to be a being in the world is a complex adaptive system. You have to decipher what is and what is relevant in relationship to what then to metabolize to then what moves to your capacity to maintain your complex adaptive design. So the process of activity and you see it, I mean, we can go all the way up to humans and say, Descartes’ error in relationship. And if you short circuit the valuation system, people just don’t move basically. There’s no, the intellectual capacity can solve problems, but it actually, in order to be in the world, and this then moves up to behavioral investment theory, which is very similar, of course, to recursive relevance realization says, hey, the nervous system is an investment value system. It’s the whole approach avoidance, pleasure, pain architecture is for the organism to be plugged into, this is good for me and this is bad for me. So the lived experience of being an animal and then into a primate affords the capacity to fuse is from the perspective and the context, the situational developmental context of the organism. It has an inbred valued structure. That’s the nature of existence in relation. So at that level, there’s a fusion. And then what Zach said, and then I would say, from my vantage point, then what emerges on top of that layer is a layer of propositional reflection, the problem of justification. And then when we drop propositional justifications and then create the negative space of the question, then I would argue that, yeah, what analytic or epistemological reflection gets us to through first Socrates, if you know, whatever, into science is actually the kinds of justification that afford legitimizing our ontology and the degree of accuracy questions. Like this is a good coherent correspondence network of propositions that corresponds, describes and explain what is in the world relative to a normative articulation that legitimizes this is what we ought to do are two very different kinds of justification systems that are used to legitimize those particular types of claims. And fundamentally, that’s the way the defensible sort of humane frame, which is basically, yay, the kinds of justification that are involved in legitimizing accuracy is kept to questions are different fundamentally than the kinds of justifications that are involved to legitimize shared normative moral claims. So that’s where you get that split. And the basic evidence for that is you can, no matter what you see as is, there’s no foundation analytic deductive argument that gets you to awe. So that’s the weak version. And I think that’s for me that there’s legitimacy there. At the same time, the idea that these then become completely different magistrates. And then the task, we can then split off of science, say, and then have science be the task of determining what is without thinking about the values that go into science that justify it to begin with all the epistemic values around truth, honesty, accuracy and relationship, which have to be committed a priori to build the system of justification. And not only that, the way in which that system of justification evolves and then gets legitimized by power structures and then legitimizes technologies, industries, and that’s even for the physical and biological and animal psychological sciences. Then we get into the human sciences. And now the entire analytic system of justification describing what it is for a human to transform, even at a descriptive explanatory way, and has to enact the systems of justification that we’re embedded in and therefore create a massive feedback loop about how the descriptions and explanations are going to impute themselves upon the actual lived experiences, which are fact value fusing systems. And therefore, you can’t simply describe and maintain the differentiation of the objective description with what is presumably is independent. So you absolutely have to then reflect on the processes by which you actually describe and explain and see a fusion of systems of justification that do not afford a clean, crisp, separate break between the objective descriptions and the way they’re employed. So Tony Giddens, the sociologist, calls that the double hermeneutic, a double interpretive system. And so the bottom line is that this level is all this entanglement across all these different forms of being. So that’s the way I would then say sort of, yeah, there’s the embedded entanglement. There’s the emergence of the separation that does have some degree of legitimacy. It is different to do physics than engineering. It’s different than do biology than medicine. And my estimation is very different to be a descriptive psychologist and a professional applied licensed healer. Those are different domains. But at the same time, the crosstalk between these justification systems and their entanglement. I love Bashgar’s double helix. Is there more, Greg? So yeah, that’s kind of my snapshot picture from kind of a you talk and basically just summarize. And I think both of what you guys are saying from a slightly different angle. And it resonates with John’s question, which was like, what is this undergirding thing which exists both prior to the differentiation and onto genetically in human development, which is to say little kids don’t make the isot distinction. Just so you know, like they just don’t. It’s just bad or good, basically. It’s just mixed together at the level of. Like I would say that you don’t have the isot distinction anywhere in the universe before formal operations emerges in the human mind. I’m being like crassly Piagetian. But what that point entails is that, and we talked about this before from an evolutionary epistemology view, it means that the field of value goes all the way back into the pre-human biological world. And so this is, I think, the other assumption that’s woven into the distinction that modernity set up and the triumphalism of science and the kind of like weird confusion about what to do with morality has to do with the disenchantment of the universe of value. And what that means is basically that, well, you can’t say descriptive things about value because humans put value on a valueless universe. And that was one of the kind of running assumptions that modernity ended up with, I think, against its, like it kind of led to that conclusion. And I think the religious wars out of which it emerged kind of create the backlash against certain forms of obviously irrational positing of value in nature. But I think part of the merger that you’re looking for, John, and that we’re all kind of like resting and kind of like has to do with, and we’ve talked about before, getting at an ontological layer, deeper conversations. Before we get into psychological or even philosophical resolution, like this actually becomes an ontological problem about the nature of the universe. And so like Piaget tried to solve the problem of the nature of the universe by looking at the problem of the embryo turning into Einstein. And like the difference in what’s relevant and what is perceived as real by that nervous system over the course of that time. So it’s like there’s this point of, so he would like, Piaget would say something like, it’s not in the beginning is the word. In the beginning is the act. This is to your point. That underlying the human superstructure of cognition that can separate fact from value is a human, and this is what you’re saying, Greg, is a human action system, a human interpersonal relational attachment system, where those things are inextricably fused, and that performs the basis on which an isomorphism pops up to the next level. So I don’t know if I’m making any sense anymore, but Greg, your point about what’s the common thing between the justification systems is that they’re all justification systems. And justification systems take place in social contexts where we’re with each other, needing to live together, and meeting one another. So there’s a fusion of obligation and logic. This was one of Piaget’s points. He was saying, you’re obligated to think logically. Why? Because other people exist. And that’s how you learn that first in contexts that aren’t ostensibly logical. And so there are embedded in our nervous systems the ease of moving between facts and value. We do it easily, which is why I think we need to be careful. And just to give more than you like relevance realization as an example, there are tons of concepts that serve both purposes intrinsically. I think it was Bernard Williams that was the idea of a thick concept. A thick concept is both simultaneously descriptive and evaluative through its application. This is not what relevance realization is. Relevance realization is something else, but like a term like maturity or a term like wise. This is a term that claims to be both descriptively accurate and not evaluatively neutral by essence of its application. Like psychopathology. Precisely. And so this is my point is that in educational psychology and psychotherapy, we’re trafficking in thick concepts. And here’s where the trick gets played is that we think the trick concept with a thick concept is just a scientific concept. And so we end up with a crypto normative smuggling of actual normative conversations that need to happen, that don’t happen because we’re just having a scientific conversation. Oh, and by the way, there’s no such thing as value. So we’re all relativists anyway. It doesn’t really exist in the universe. So we’ll solve this with statistics and see if it somehow contributes, I don’t know, to like GDP. There’s some way it grounds down to efficiency of behavior at the end of the day. And anyway, that was a strange ramble, but I hope that was useful to you. Great. I thought I was totally following that. John, you had something? Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think maybe relevance is a thick concept. But I think it’s also a term pointing to something that’s preconceptual. So I get your hesitation, and I endorse that. But I want to point out, and I’m not denying that wise and mature are thick concepts, but I want to throw something out here. Because you’re right, by the way, Zach. I think a lot of this ultimately grounds out in a degenerative, or maybe decadent, a decadent superficial pragmatism. Well, efficiency of GDP. Well, why? OK, but I want to throw out a term here because I think it’s a very thick term. And food is simultaneously, this is Evan Thompson, great point. Food is simultaneously descriptive. And if you don’t have a notion of food, you’re not going to be able to explain life other than maybe plants, unless you want to say that sunlight’s food for them. But anyways, and yet, food is good for me. That’s a defining feature of good, of food, I mean. And we smuggle it in under terms that sound purely descriptive but are normative, like edible. Well, don’t put stones in your mouth. They’re not edible. Well, right. So that’s what I’m trying to get at. I’m trying to get at that. I’m not trying to deny anything you said, Zach, but I’m trying to say, but it’s like it’s pervasive. It’s in the mundane, I mean, a heidegger. It’s in the mundane everydayness of our lives that we are in these thick concepts. And here’s what I would add, given relevance realization. We can’t move around or do a damn single thing without that network of things. Right. What you both said, really, I mean, for me, I’ll put it in John’s terminology. We can really think about this analytic is-ought distinction as a sort of an invented psychotechnology that affords some angles on our systems of justification. But it is not the kind of ontological, pristine discovery that only thing that exists in the universe isness or whatever. And then we impute values upon that, especially with a careless definition of value. That’s absurd. I mean, values, Zach, I think you said at one point, I listened to it was maybe on a podcast, the world is drenched in meaning. And at a metaphysical level, I mean, this is, if you’re getting eaten, if you’re a gazelle getting eaten by a lion, that fucking sucks. Not just because you think it sucks. Not just because it fucks for the, the fucking gazelle is not happy. He’s high, he’s running his goddamn ass off because that’s not good. And the value of that is unbelievably intense and it’s embedded in the cells of the gazelle. And it’s good food, it’s food for the lion. And so that’s to me, that’s why you have to, and actually that’s why I call it investment value system, like to ensure that value emerges in the context of nature before we say anything about it at the level of the embodiment of good and bad exists. Now we then have to come out and say, well, is that, is it good for the gazelle to get away? Is it good for the lion to get caught? I mean, those are all secondary, subsequent normative reflective structures that we have to bring to bear on that. But that’s, and our normative structures will be embedded in really most of the time post-hoc justifications of our perspectival participatory intuition about what the fuck is good that we bring to bear as a primate onto the world. Yeah, that’s a good, I mean, Plato has this argument that, and the best book ever written on Plato, Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason by Schindler, about the argument I’ve been making, this deep end of penetration between goodness and realness, and that any attempt to make sense of things is always simultaneously a normative project and a epistemological, and a descriptive project, like the attempt to separate them will leave you with a radical kind of relativism, a radical kind of nihilism that undermines any of the arguments you were trying to use to establish that ontology in the first place. That’s always the key platonic move. It’s like, well, let’s take what you’re saying really seriously, let’s apply it, and then notice how it completely gets rid of all the facts and arguments you were using to establish your conclusions, right? And so what I think I’m hearing, it’s not pushback, we’re discussing, feedback, what I’m hearing is feedback is, yeah, and Greg, I think I like what you did with the psychotechnologies, let’s say that ontologically, in a deep sense of ontology, right, there isn’t an ontological divide, at least at some sort of ground level zero of realness or something like that. But what you’re both saying, and I think, and I wanna put, I wanna really acknowledge this is, yeah, but how do I know in specific situations whether it’s legitimate or illegitimate, right? Because what I heard Zach giving is, well, here’s several instances where it’s clearly illegitimate to move from one to the other. And I have no argument against those cases. I wanna be very clear about it. When people are medicalizing things in order to mask that a normative judgment is just a description, right? And all that, there’s all kinds of bullshitting that goes on here. I totally acknowledge that. So for me, and this is the virtue ethic question is, yeah, but what do I do? And notice how this is both an epistemological and an ethical question. What do I do so that I can get better at discerning the good cases where they blur from the bad cases where they go blur? And how do I do that in a non-circular fashion? Cause I just invoke good and bad, right? And so there you go, there’s the new version. Oh, all right. I mean, it’s interesting, right? Because I agree with your statement that it’s everywhere. And I kinda tried to say that, I was saying like, normal humans who aren’t speaking from a philosophical podium don’t make the fact value distinction except in those cases where it seems like it might be problematic. So this is to your point that there is, and this is again, the Neo-Piagetian view is one of differentiation and then reintegration. Yes, yes, yes. What you’re looking at is actually a profound and important innovation which has outstayed its due. And so I’ve also been talking about like the cultural implications of this distinction being so reified, highest levels of the academy and kind of filtering down into all of this stuff, meeting with educational opportunity that brings people to formal operations so they can actually understand the distinction. And so that creates an environment where you end up getting, I think for the first time in history, a bunch of people rigorously separating fact from value, believing they’re living in a society that runs based on facts, and that even their values are facts. And yet trafficking in deep evaluation and meaning making in their lives, which needs a form of discourse about the nature and value that’s a non-factual discourse, that’s like a religio discourse. Yeah, totally. There’s a whole thing going on there. But I think the point I was trying to make too, which I wanna make clear again, is that like there’s something in, and this is kind of a Habermasian point, there’s something in human behavior and specifically linguistic communication, which shows us the way we do it all the time. And then all of a sudden we do it and it doesn’t work, or it seems appropriate when you just slow down. So I guess what I’m saying is like, the solving of the problem is already done all the time by everybody. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? And it’s like the philosophers were worried like, wait. And so in the context of education or in the context of psychotherapy, it ends up being symptomatic. I would say the neurosis, some forms of neurosis, basically are the result of people doing that inappropriately. So you’re saying, John, that people want reality. Kind of not exactly true. Because people also don’t like reality and like to live in fantasies. Now sometimes those fantasies bring them in touch with some other intellectual reality, but sometimes they don’t. And so if you have a neurological distortion of your own personality, excuse me, neurotic distortion of your own personality, that’s gonna run on an is-ought blurring that’s inappropriate. Yes, yes. This thing that I’m doing that I have a tendency to do, that’s a habit to do, that’s the fact. That’s the direction you’re going. Humans have often done that. Evolutionary biology shows you that we do that. Like totally be a competitive dick your entire life. Just do that. That’s how it is. That’s how it ought to be as well. And so you’re maintaining a sense of that value is equated with fact when actually it’s not in this case of that equated with fact. And so what are the rationalizations that congeal around maintaining that illogical blurring? So in education, similarly, I think you see like there’s a tendency for us to believe that the outcome, like for example, kids at this age have been shown to read 90% of them. Right. So therefore, if your kids not reading at that age, well, that’s a problem. Call somebody. Right. This is a problem. And so in one sense, that’s true. But if you look carefully at the scientific research, there’s all of these things, but that’s an example where it’s like, okay, we need to be careful there about the descriptive language and the evaluative language that are showing up there and not pretend that this is just a problem of a scientific problem. And in part because that science is actually problematic, but also because the question of what to do then, how to characterize it. Is it a… So there’s a whole bunch of questions that I think are interesting. So in a sense, what I guess I’m saying like, yeah, we could take simple examples from everyday life when we do this and do it well and it’s appropriate, and then see that there are these places where there are cul-de-sacs in the is-ought kind of like conversation. And we just kind of like, we need to, and we end up lingering there. And those are the places where things get weaponized and we try to resolve conversations too quickly. And the triumph of fact over value wins because it’s actually a very sticky wicket where the Bascarian helix is moving very quickly, as opposed to other places where it’s like, oh, I’m hungry. That’s a fact. I should eat. That’s a value that comes with that fact, like super nice and neat. So, yeah. So that’s, I’ll leave it at that. Yeah, I just, I’m struck and been struck for a while when I really sort of like got sophisticated about this, about how devoid our standard educational system is in regarding this issue. I mean, there’s just, if you look at the common core, it’s just language. So learn how to do language, learn how to do math, learn how to do science, learn how to do social studies. And what is ethics? And then how do we actually make values and just introducing some basic value frames like consequentialist ethics and some sort of category, equivalent of a content and categorical imperative, some sort of notion of birth through ethics. We just do nothing of that until, unless you’re like basically a philosophy student. It’s really striking that we essentially don’t teach people about the complexity of this issue and how to essentially cultivate a moral purpose making system. And I really think the excessiveness of facts and then science, technology and democracy and the separation then of religion over here in relation. And then that’s dealt with the home that we got so way, we’re like a fucking crab with a giant arm over here trying to cut up what is in this little tiny ought thing that just gets totally shriveled in relation. And that’s a horrible imbalance in relationship to our systems of justification. So I like what I’m hearing from both of you is that there’s a way of trying to address the refined version of the question, which is how we came up, how Aristotle came up with logic. You just look at what are the inferential things that people do and you don’t stick there or logic develops, but to get it started, take a look at a comprehensive examination of where’s it going well. And again, there’s a circle and where’s it not going well? And what are the patterns here and what are the patterns there? And I think you’re right, Greg, that makes it inherently an educational project because we don’t wanna just, right? Because I mean, whenever we’re doing this, this is an argument made by Cohen and other people like that, because we trade between, this is how we do it, these are the rules of how we do it, right? And these are, let me show you what I mean. So we might say, well, whenever we’re doing politics, we should keep the is ought and we try to make that rule, right? And then we realize, but there’s lots of places where we violate that. And so what do we do? Do we change the rule or do we throw out that as just performance error? This is the Chomskyan, this is this Chomskyan decision we face, which is, right? Sometimes you throw out the errors, they don’t undermine your normative theory because it’s a good normative theory. And you just say the errors are just that people are tired or performance errors, blah, blah. It happens. Yeah, basically. And then at other times, you know, we better revise the theory because we’re getting too much errors. I mean, it’s Piaget’s discovery of the systematicity in the errors in IQ tests, that was one of his profound insights. Everybody was treating that as noise. And he said, no, no, these are systematic. And that means these are not performance errors, these are competence errors, right? And do you see what I mean? Like this project that’s being proposed, and I agree with you, Greg, we don’t do this at all. And I think that’s your point too, Zach. We’re not doing this at all. But then again, just to weave it in, right? If the onto epistemic project is inherently a educational project, that means that these three domains of transformation, education, and the onto epistemic relation are deeply, deeply interwoven. Like they’re deeply, deeply profoundly interwoven. And that is extremely contra modernity and enlightenment as a proposal. Totally, and that is like, I was feeling like John Dewey’s presence in the room, you know, because this is the realization that I had. Those guys are getting it, finally! I’m scared of John Dewey, he’s like, Jesus! You realize you need, like, well, I’ve, Perce brought me to it really, that I realized Perce wasn’t doing epistemology, he was actually doing some kind of theory of learning. He wasn’t looking at how do we establish a static state of knowledge. He was looking at how do we assure we’re learning in continuity, you know, broadly. And so that notion of, yeah, at the end of the day, even epistemology caches out in something that’s like learning. And then Dewey ties that loop into evolution and culture itself, which is to say that if you’re gonna be running your basis of your philosophy on a theory of learning, that means that the basis of your society is something like this learning, what I call social autopoiesis, right? The mechanisms of intergenerational transmission by which society recreates itself become the key focus of application for, you know, all of thought, basically, to overgeneralize Dewey’s point. And so, yeah, the primacy of education as a human endeavor follows from the primacy of learning as a philosophical concern in the domains of epistemology and ontology. And so the merger of those two, again, back to Plotinus, right, gives us that relation between being and knowing as primordial. And then when you think of knowing as this thing, which is socially mediated and developmental, then you end up getting also these, when we talked about last time, like the disclosure of more reality through the engagement of certain kinds of practices in social community. So we talked last time about the forms of imaginal practice that allow for better detection of actually real things in the world. Yeah. And then if they do the neoplatonic argument, that’s bound up with the autopolisis of culture, of civilization, right? Those two are bound up together. And there’s kind of this normativity of keep the culture, keep the civilization going because all other, everything else we wanna do depends on that in a fundamental way. Yeah, yeah, Perce is one of his logos. I actually had a t-shirt made with his picture on it and underneath it, well, my wife made it, Megan, and it says underneath it, don’t block the way of inquiry or don’t block the path of inquiry. This was the notion of the main thing that society should be trying to arrange for itself to do is strong, strong conditions for the possibility of learning and ongoing learning. Yes, yes. And that would allow for at the society-wide level, something like a fact value helix to function instead of having something that looks different, either a reduction to just fact discourse or a reduction to just value discourse. Both of those are very dangerous. And sometimes you get this weird mixture of the two, which is just basically propaganda. So yeah, so I think you nailed it there with that notion of the onto-epistemological project grounding in something like a universal theory of learning or education. Yes, I agree. And the result being a social praxis in which you get greater reality disclosure than meaning making possibilities widely distributed. That’s very close how I end up sort of affording particular kinds of justification for moral ethical values. And I’d be interested to hear your guys’ thoughts about what you ground, is it grounded in a virtue ethics in a consequentialist ethics or whatever. So one of the things that I’d like to drop is that question, it’s like, okay, well, what are the grounds upon which we make a value to judgments about normative claims and where does that get anchored into our system of justification? I’ll throw out three options. So one option is what I would call moral absolutism. Moral absolutism, which is bound in many religions and others sort of is the idea that ontologically, yes, there are forces in the world, good and evil forces in the world like Star Wars. You have the force, by you living in the Star Wars world, yeah, there’s the light and the dark force and those things are real. You can see they have real consequences. I would call that sort of a, imagine, that’s an example thought experience of an absolute moral world that has a metaphysical ontological structure around good and evil. If you discount that, then you back up into a relativist view. And then at some deconstructive extreme relativist views, you then completely situate it in the imminent, contextual, subjective to intersubjective systems of justification that can only be evaluated to whatever extent in the context of evaluation that’s being offered. And therefore there’s no generalizable ground upon which somebody can make any kind of outside of the system that’s being claimed. I don’t like either one of those frames, at least in the sense that I don’t see a justification for some sort of absolute ontological, good evil structures in the world, independent completely, and at the same time in extreme relativism doesn’t work. So I certainly find myself in between those. And I’d be curious to see where, if you guys identify in terms of your own moral, ethical, value, structure, a particular guide system frame of reference that grounds your normative considerations. Well, for me, I don’t know if this sits between them or beyond them or before them. I take the idea that realness is bound to intelligibility, some sense of intelligibility, some sense of integrity, and independence, right? Whether we would say something’s real, there’s the three ends. It’s intelligible in some way, it’s for itself in some way, and it can be independent from us in some way. And those are not identical, and people often treat them as if they’re identical, and that’s problematic. And I know there’s, but I think there’s something going on there. And so for me, that triad, is something towards which we have to get an absolute allegiance, because anything else we try to do presupposes it in a fundamental way. And so we’re either ultimately being self-destructive, or we are attempting to flourish. And then if you could say, why do you wanna flourish rather than destroy myself, I’ll just say that’s what all wanting and desiring is, like, why do I desire flourishing? That’s a misposed question. I don’t desire flourishing, I happen to always be flourishing or trying to flourish. I mean, you understand what I’m saying? Yeah, yeah, okay, so. What’s north of the North Pole, right? So you drop it into sort of the, sort of in the sovereignty of the good justification in some ways, the processes by which the attention and sort of gripping of the real and the affordances that the way that emerges creates an orientation for you in a particular way that then. Yeah, because all learning and all transformation require a process of self-correction. And if you don’t have what I just described, there is no way to legitimate self-correction. And then if you can’t legitimate self-correction, the only way of influencing other people or your own behavior is through force. What other alternative is there, right? I don’t know if that answered your question or not, Greg. Well, I mean, no, it answers some of my, I mean, this is a very rich and potentially very long, kind of what grounds us. It’s the deepest meta, it was the deepest meta ethical question you can ask, right? Yeah. Well, here’s what comes to mind. So my moral structure emerges through the journey that I went through and definitely is situated in the clinical practice. I mean, I really found myself sort of what’s my authority? When do I say that’s bad? And when do I puke my authority onto somebody? My good friend, Steve Quackenbush, although he’s not a clinician, developmental psychologist, had a moral crisis when he encountered the phenomenon of depressive realism. Depressive realism is the idea that people who, or at least there’s an empirical argument to say that people who are moderately, mildly to moderately depressed actually have more accurate judgments in relationship to their attractiveness, their capacity to control, how much other people like them, how popular they are. In other words, there’s a correlation between a rose-colored glasses about who you are and how effective you are relative to your mood that would then create basically a potential conflict between say accurate integrity. Well, you’re actually not that attractive, not that effective and a depressed kind of mood of like, oh, I’m just an average joke on a deal. So he, I know for his own life in relationship to what is it that he’s trying to cultivate as a developmental psychologist involved in his case, that sort of education and teaching, how do what is my value structure? And that led him down to a deep path. So while you were talking, John, in relationship to sort of the real grip, I was just, that’s one of the conversations that popped into my head in relationship to that tension. I don’t know if that elicits anything in you in relationship. It does, it does. But I’m, first of all, there’s, I mean, you know this, so I’ll just say for the benefit of people listening, there’s lots of controversy around depressive realism. That’s, it is complicated. Yes. There’s scope and particular domains. In other areas, it doesn’t track reality well. Totally. It’s a, right, it’s a thought experiment that the empirical justification for it is debatable. I’ll certainly say that. And it’s also- That just makes me more depressed now. And it also is a logical framework, not a positive psychology. If people continue long enough in the right way, that they come around after the disillusionment to a state in which they’re both accurate, both more accurate and also happier. We don’t know, right? So we might be in a local minima there, but there’s lots of philosophical traditions that say, you have to go through this horrible dark night of the soul before you get to the glorious sunrise. And if you avoid the dark night, yeah, you won’t get that upset, but you’ll never get the glorious sunrise, right? So that’s sort of two things that come to mind in response to that, which is again, I’m not just fencing with you. I’m trying to say what happens is when we expand out the context to try and evaluate depressive realism, we find ourselves back into the very context we were talking about, which is the necessity for learning, how this is all ultimately premised on a model of development and transformation. And that’s ultimately has something to do with being coupled to realness in the right way, but what do we mean by right? And how is that bound up with flourishing? So that’s all I was trying to point that when I try, I totally agree with that. The response just takes us back into the very thing we’re wrestling with. And that’s not, sorry, Greg, that was not meant to be dismissive in any way. Oh, no, I didn’t feel like that. Okay, okay. So no, it’s a reasonable articulation. I was just, I jumped to that as you were talking as a, let’s see, you know, metabolize that. That makes good sense in terms of which sentence. I mean, it’s interesting, Greg. So like, I’m harping on the Neo-Piagetian chord, but here we go. The Colberg was interested in exactly that question. And Habermas actually links his whole moral philosophy and moral phenomenology into Colberg’s inquiry around this question. And he was like, well, I’m gonna do it semi-empirically. I’m gonna actually look at the way the moral justification system works in the West with a bunch of Catholic schoolboys and basically see as they get older, when they start to have to justify for themselves really complex moral things in their own lives. Like, what are the upper reaches of the way people actually think about morality just spontaneously? And now these kids were pretty well educated. They, you know, had basic, so it’s, again, there’s a lot of things that can take about culture, but he’s asking the question about like, and similar to the question I was saying to John, well, let’s observe in human behavior the way that we do this. And what’s interesting and it very kind of rolls in, but also ends up being a kind of moral realism, which Habermas ended up distancing himself from, but that’s another conversation, is this notion of like moral musical chairs, which he actually took that phrase from George Herbert Mead, Colberg. And what you do there is you’re thinking, well, how do I justify an action, right? So what is the effect of this action on everyone, right? And more specifically, if I were in their shoes, could I consent to this action? So this is where all the veil of ignorance, right? Where you actually say, okay, you know, look at this thing you’re about to do, where you have to make a moral evaluation of is this a good thing to do? And think about all the possible perspectives on it, the Omni Considered Review, specifically an empathetic Omni Considered Review that ends up positioning you in various things. So that’s an interesting route that Colberg basically saw in his most sophisticated reasoners, and this was replicated, and there’s all these conversations about what stage six really looks like, whether we should even talk about stage six at all. But there was this common refrain, and I found it in my own work in moral development, where beyond a certain kind of like level of cognitive complexity, you start to get the use of a common kind of decision procedure in people who are dealing with very complex things and then moral justification kind of area. And so I think that’s worth noting. And so that leads me to the way I often think about this, and we talked about it last time, I think, where you’re saying you wanna develop, you’re saying that’s John, like transformation as a reality dependent transformation, like, and so how do you develop in relation coupled to reality and not just coupled from reality? And then this is integrist development between organism and reality basically. We were saying that like before a certain stage in human development, in most environments that’s happening, like you learn to walk without instruction from the state and special curriculum. You learn to speak without instruction from the state and special curriculum. You learn about what’s good and bad. Outside of parental observation and instruction in peer group relationship from the basic coupling of the organism with moral realities. And I believe more realities feature description John of things that are real in the sense of their independence and et cetera. And so I think this is the place to plug in is basically right at the place where the justification system can start to interface with the simulation of reality. And there’s many variants of that. And that’s exactly interesting. That’s essentially what I backed into. And then when I saw more Colberg in a particular way that varies. In other words, what I did when I hooked into the idea of justification systems as these networks of propositional fact value legitimizing structures. And then you sort of like, okay, well, as you expand that you extract the fundamental themes that leverage the odds across all different structures. And then I backed into integrity, dignity and wellbeing as at least one interpretation of really goodness, truth and beauty in relationship to the kinds of leveraging that systems of justification use across cultures and context and musical chairs in that regard. So if you look, like I said the universal declaration of human rights that would be an example of a very broad set of chairs that people have sat around moving around and then extracted a particular kind of leveraging claim that then would afford the most generalizable position in relation, at least in, I think there’s parallels. I’ll put it that way. It’s certainly not identical. It’s parallel. So what I’m hearing is, so Zach is emphasizing sort of a diachronic investigation. And then Greg is saying, yeah but there’s also a synchronic investigation. And this again- That was the path I took basically. It was a synchronic. Yeah, and there’s total, I think there’s legitimacy in that. And then the platonic dialectic is trying to do both of those in some kind of coordinated fashion. Like let’s take a bunch of people through transformation and let’s see how they continue to talk to each other as they’re going through it. Right? And yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. That’s very good. And how to create, so like it’s common now that kids don’t get enough time outdoors. And so they actually lack sensory motor capacities at a relatively quote low level. Like in normal human societies, kids had a lot of these experiences for six or seven really- Right. And this includes things like being in large spaces where you can throw balls and other stuff like that. I’m talking about intense urban environments. And so then you get the kids to the woods, you get them in a course and you put them in a situation for their body to actually go through reality dependent transformation. You sort of have to create a context for that. So then the question becomes analogously, what are those contexts we can create that put people in reality dependent relationship with morality and ethics. Love it. Yeah, beautiful. And their own normativity that actually work. And so this is where I think monastic traditions become super interesting. Because it’s one thing to like go for a weekend retreat or something. It’s another thing to live for months on end with the same people making claims about who you are and how your behavior is. And so it’s also a context of containment and kind of like interaction and like an allegiance to reciprocity is built into the structure. So I’m talking about not monasteries that you hate and have problems. I’m talking about like the idea of a monastery. Like of course there’s violations of this and there’s pathological hierarchies and all kinds of bad stuff that happened in monasteries. But, and it doesn’t need to be a monastery. I think this is what people are trying to do with communes often. They’re trying to put themselves in a position to know that their behaviors are good, to get feedback from actual other humans and don’t have just merely strategic and contractual relationships to them. So you can be in a situation in an urban environment where you’re either in a commercial relationship with someone or transactional relationship with someone. You don’t have a family, you don’t have a friend. You’ve only have strategic relationships to your environment, as possible. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of loneliness. And one of the ways that this characterizes by that, it’s that all the relationships are strategic and can be handled through basically description. None of them are mediated through life world, mutual understanding, shared reciprocity of commitment to ethics or things of that nature. And so we have to find ways to create the equivalent of like those outward bound camps, but in contexts where ethics are in play. And again, sometimes those contexts of outward boundaries exactly where that can happen. Because it’s hard to simulate an ethical crisis. Like, and actually it’s unethical sometimes to simulate ethical crisis. So the question is kind of like, how do we allow people to live reflectively enough? So anyway, to process these things. So that’s some of my thinking there is that the deeper we get into the simulation, entertainment, et cetera, the harder it is to create the sense of moral realism that’s necessary. Yeah, yeah. That’s right. Like you would have as a kid playing with your brother without your parents around, like a sense of hitting, there’s another person here. We’re in a relationship, we can’t get out of where brother’s, right? And so there’s that sense of, yeah, that it matters. In the way that you learn about, you can’t jump off something this tall. Like your body learns that to fear that. Because it’s a reality dependent, acquisition of knowledge in your body about how gravity works and things about nature. And so, yeah, so I think there’s a kind of ethical, moral virtue value cross training that we’re looking for. And it ties into this notion of how to create those imaginable contexts. Totally, exactly. It’s not that once we get it, it’s not that there’s like, so I’m saying you come up, it’s a reality dependent to a certain point. Beyond that point, you get into the simulation. It’s not a question of some of these things aren’t simulations and some of them are. It’s like there’s a sense of certain ones have reality dependence, but there’s many ways to articulate it. Right, so like I’m thinking about the neo-coronialism I’ve been working on. So it’s not that there’s one solution to this problem, but it is that there are, experienceable real value in the universe. Yep. Yeah, so I’ll leave it at that. Again, I felt like that didn’t. No, I think that does a really nice job of bridging a number of our themes in relationship to what we’re about here in relation to cultivating and articulation of what is human transformation. How do we make meta-psychological reflective judgments about what are the implications in sort of the idealized or thought experimental real world practices of the kinds of things we would wanna cultivate in the educational transmission. So that’s a, yeah. I think we’re on the right track precisely because this is not just the Duncan experiments. I’m in an ongoing discussion and friendship with Rafe Kelly who has created, like they do parkour experiments together out in nature. They rough house, they do martial arts, they do mindfulness, they do situated appreciates. It sits there like you sit still and learn to really absorb the soundscape. And then, but you also sit around the campfire and talk about sort of mythological themes like, and he didn’t, and I mean, this is a compliment. Like he didn’t sort of top down this into existence. He’s slow, this has slowly been something that he’s been evolving. It’s called evolve, move, play, right? For good reason. This, how do we engage people in a process of real transformation such that they find religio again, in a really profound way. And again, not just as an aesthetic experience, but like you’re saying Zach, that actual functional coupledness to the world that has, can have sacredness in it, right? It takes us to that point, right? In an enacted participatory way. And he’s been doing that and he’s not, I mean, I know him personally and I vouch for his character and everything. And so I know it’s worth more intimately, but he’s not a singular case. There’s all of these things spring, this is what I think is a response to the meaning crisis. People are already doing, so what we’re talking about, in fact, what you were just, what you’re describing, right? At a theoretical level, I see all over the place and I’m giving you one clear exemplar, right? People doing this, doing exactly this, trying to do exactly what you’re describing and tinkering with it and doing bricolage with it and talking and discussing and trying to continually improve. And that is a growing movement right now. And I think one of the things that the meta-psychology should do some ethnographic work on is these emerging communities and how they’re doing exactly this kind of thing, exactly this kind of thing. Yep, no, I completely agree. I completely agree. It’s a fascinating movement and that’s why it’s important to have these conversations about facts and values and things of that nature, you know? Because the meaning crisis is an example of a moral reality that you can run into. So there’s a need there. So I’m very interested in quality control. How do you even do research on communities like that that’s interesting, you know? Because that’s the transformational kind of movement in the United States that’s shown since the 60s. Like, boomers went on all those retreats, man. Like, and now where are we, right? So there is this question, and Jamie Wheal gets into that. He’s a friend of mine that was talked about this. It’s complex, it’s very complex. And I don’t know the work you’re speaking to specifically, and I’ve seen amazing successful examples. I work a lot with outdoor educators in particular, like K-12 ones, have been very interested in my book, which is a good de-schooling kind of book, so it makes sense. So I’ve seen a lot of great examples there. And I’ve seen some good stuff with adult development communities, but I’ve also seen some stuff from like, mm. Yeah, exactly. I’m not sure that experience is gonna stick with you when you go home and have to get back into your normal life. Well, yeah. Well, we see that over and over. The issue of transfer, like, when, like, whoa. You know, religions seem to have gotten very good at ecologies of practices, that within whatever imaginable space they’re doing the serious play, that permeate their lives, right? And connect with reality in reliable ways. But I think we should call this one to a close. I think we- Oh, great, I think it’s very nice. Very, a nice conclusion. Well, not a conclusion, but- It was good, people. It was good. As always, just, I won’t say anything more. Just any final comments from either one of you? No, I mean, this was exactly what I was hoping. I really enjoyed it, especially just listening to both of you articulate that. I felt very affirmed relative to my own, you know, forays into this framing. It was definitely much resonant. So I appreciate both of your eloquence and adept on this issue. Yeah, that was a blast. I haven’t talked about that in depth in some years. So I was kind of like remembering things. Now I have all this other stuff that I remember that I haven’t said, so we’ll get to it next time. Thank you very much, gentlemen.