i.e. based on concrete arguments for this or that concrete ethical claim, not based on the abstract meta-reasoning about what can be said or not, or what means what, of meta-ethics.

fiat = Latin for: it shall be (so), like in the Latin Bible when God says Fiat lux = Let there be light … In other words, those meta-ethical theories would declare some substantive normative claims as false or not a legitimate part of ethical reasoning, as if they could just make them vanish like God makes things come into being.

i.e. the so-called analytic philosophy that dominated Anglophone philosophy and is still very strong there saw the job of a philosopher as figuring out what people really mean when they say things and to pick apart issues into their conceptual components.

arrogance that amounts to a form of infringement or injustice

inclusive (metaphor from Christian attempts to find common ground between different religions and types of Christianity)

Note that goodness is ambiguous here. McShane identifies it with value, which is, indeed the primary sense. However, goodness applied to a person can also mean virtue (the Greek term aretê has the literal meaning "bestness"). The difference is that goodness in the sense of value pertains to everything that you want to have or want to exist because it's so good. Goodness in the sense of virtue is a good or value in a more narrow sense: it's the good instantiated by a person, something that yourself might wish to have or would like others to have as well.

i.e. how one type of theory follows logically from the other, or is logically consistent with it

The opposite of universal or global; from a perspective that is too narrow and uninformed (and somewhat old-fashioned).

This is a great summary of what one might call anthropocentrism.

Just as a reminder, since it's a new term: value independent from anything outside themselves. They are not just means to be employed for human purposes (that would be instrumental value); they are ends in themselves.

To my PL2041 students: Don't bother about this part of section 1 unless you are super interested. You can skip it.

Maybe quickly about "minimalist theories of truth": in a nutshell they say that some statement can be true (a) if it is EITHER false OR true and (b) if it IS either false or true irrespective of the reasons you can give for its being true or false.

claim to be, are supposed to be

i.e. a command, or an expectation that something should be one, which is something that can only be fulfilled but not true or false.

Cognition is a term for information processing by sentient beings or things using some kind of language or symbol system. Cognition can be perception and thought, for example.

The study of meaning, i.e. here what the expressions we use when speaking about ethical and moral issues mean.

i.e. ethical norms that have some concrete content (e.g. that ecosystems have intrinsic value) instead of being about other ethical norms

Makes concern sound irrational. Is it?

Isn't it part of "competing knowledges" that a QAnon droplet and a science paper are treated as equal?

Reading this in Jan 2021, one wonders whether this is still at the heart of the matter. There are those that see, the evidence isn't so very hard to find, that inidividual supposed to be truth-tellers, like the President, lie in your face shamelessly. On the other hand, there are those that have no suspicion at all of this, and other no less evidently frabricating 'truth tellers'.

In short, there is no suspicion. It's either out in the open and there is no reasonable doubt that the truth is not being told; or there is no doubt or suspicion whatsoever because people are ready to believe anything.

Funny thing is, in Germany the critique in recent years has been rather the other way round, that politicians have themselves guided by polling data instead of acting according to their own well-informed judgment.

I'm not 100% sure I got this. As I understand, there is not the divide between elite/ruling class determining content and deluded masses consuming popular culture (really, a very bourgeois idea, even if Marxists entertain it).

Instead, there are experts illusionists not positioned in one class or on one political side only. I'm not sure whether this really is so. It would imply that political parties, candidates, agents, interest groups all use the same means, have access to them and no scruples to use them.

If this is the intended meaning, I'd doubt this. It is definitely not so in Germany, where I had a little bit of an opportunity to see politics and canvassing from inside.

This is now the theory "PT", I gather, not a social phenomenon or a characteristic of a period that needs explanation?

Seems that there's first of all a need to define more clearly. What is the explanandum?

To summarize:

public perception of dishonesty --> distrust and attempts to find a new epistemic footing (fact-checking market; surveys of distrust)

industry and public practice of dishonesty and artifice --> (a) really post-truth, i.e. if there's only dishonesty, let's be at least the most emotionally appealing and entertaining, or the one who tells the story people want to hear most; (b) trust: fabrications and lies are believed

Doesn't the lying come first, i.e. a measurable increase in lying by public actors whose supposed rule it is to inform accurately? Or was there no such increase and just an anxiety?

It also seems to be only the one side of the coin: concern and distrust; on the other hand is exaggerated trust in the fabricated artifices. Lies are only dangerous if there's anyone who believes them.

In a way PT is thus just one symptom (maybe more symptom than cause) of polarization: the others are untrustworthy anyway, our own are trustworthy all the time. In other words, in spite of all the technology it is, at least in the public discourse and a personal level, a loss (or absence) of empirical standards of any kind.

test 2

Here is a text comment.

This is a test.

A way of thinking in which the world is determined by two fundamentally opposing equal powers, one good and one bad. Named after a Late Antique philosophy-religion founded by Persian thinker and religious leader Mani (3rd cent.).