Today, 4/21/2024, there was an online Jordan Peterson video excerpt, from ‘You Probably Should Have Read The Bible (In the West, the Bible is the precondition of truth.).’
I took notes on the short clip and then will comment on it.
Peterson: “The Bible is true in a very strange way. It’s true that it provides the basis for truth itself. And so it is like a metatruth. Without it, there couldn’t be the possibility of truth. And so maybe that is the most true thing.
The most true thing is not some truth per se, but that which provides the precondition for all judgments of truth.”
My response: I agree that the Bible is metatrue, the base of alethic assumptions out of which discovering or making true statements arise out of.
Peterson: “I can’t see holes in that argument. And I can’t see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either because we do know well enough now as scientists that the problem of deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is an intractable problem. There are too many facts. There is an infinite number of facts. They do not provide an unerring guide for action. They can’t. There are too many of them. They have to be prioritized. And as soon as they are prioritized, well, then you are in the ethical domain.”
My response: I roughly agree with Peterson that scientific facts are descriptive, not ethical, so they cannot serve as guide for acting unless we prioritize them, and that is an ethical enterprise. Perhaps prioritizing facts is a way of bridging the is-ought gap.
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