 Oh my goodness, hang on to your hats everybody. Jason Brennan's review is finally in. I've seen it, I've read it, and it is perfect. I'm just gonna go through most of it in this video. Let me tell ya now that this is over, a little bit about the intention behind this and you'll see just why I say this review was perfect. I was not so naive going into this as to thinking that Jason was actually gonna give me a fair review. I mean, obviously he's got every incentive, both personally and as a participant in the system of academia, to try to discredit me as much as possible. Totally aware of that. Well, I also have an incentive to demonstrate to everybody who's on the fence about the respectability of those participants within the academic system, whether or not professional academics are actually serious about the world of ideas. Whether or not when they write a review about a book, do they actually do a good job? Do they really engage with the ideas or is it just kerfluffle? And Jason gave me the most perfect, pristine, airtight case that I can now take and present to everybody who has an open mind and wants to investigate for themselves just how vacuous these people are. Okay, so I was wondering before this review started. And I posted about this last week, if you wanna listen to that video. I said it's gonna be really interesting to see how Jason tries to discredit me or discredit the ideas because the scope of the book is very small and it's very, very tightly argued. So it's gonna be incredibly hard to actually engage with the ideas and say anything other than, okay, well, this is actually correct. So I thought, well, let's see what happens. I mean, maybe he's gonna argue for the existence of logical contradictions. I doubt that, but let's see. And what he did was brilliant, hysterical and a perfect demonstration of exactly what I've been talking about about the problems of academia. Before I dive into it, I get to say up front, don't take my word for it. The purpose of this is where you guys don't have to take my word for it. Read the review yourself. Read the book, read the review, put two and two together and see just how embarrassing really this review that I'm gonna go into is. All right, so the way that Jason does this is not by engaging with my ideas explicitly, not by engaging my ideas. He strawmands me, but he doesn't strawman the ideas that I present. No, he strawmands the scope of the book. It's brilliant. So the scope of the book, if anybody has been following along or has read the book, you understand, the scope of the book is very small. I'm just saying there are a limited set of certain truths about the laws of logic that underpin all of our other knowledge. When you understand it, you understand the laws of logic are necessary, inescapable, absolutely true. And therefore, for example, contradictions don't exist or in all cases of contradiction, there's some human error that's been made. That's the point of the book I'm explicit throughout. So rather than deal with that, which I make a really damn good case that that's the case, he changes the scope of the book. I don't know if this is, I suspect this is intentional. This is the only way that he can go about trying to discredit what I've been doing. Now, he changed the scope so it's not just about what I'm actually claiming. He's claiming that Square One is a book about supposed to be some complete theory of epistemology. So there's all these other claims that he's saying that I'm claiming Square One covers and it explicitly doesn't cover. So rather than talk about this, which is what I actually talk about, he talks about in the entire review, 90% of it. He's talking about literally the ideas that I don't cover because he's straw manned the purpose of the book as to be, well, this isn't a complete theory of epistemology. Let me tell you about the basics of epistemology. Totally irrelevant and totally transparent. To be honest, I'm shocked. I had a very low expectation, but I'm shocked at just how transparent this is. You go through it and it's like, okay, this isn't Steve's arguments, this isn't Steve's arguments. He admits this isn't my argument. The entire thing is based on what I'm not arguing. A complete laughable intellectual cop out. So again, don't take my word for it. Don't take his word for it. Be an independent intellectual, read both sides and the conclusion is self-evident. All right, so let's dive into it. This is a great little quote that summarizes exactly what I've said. This is the entire, really the entire position of his review is based on this. I quote, he says, Square One is meant to present a theory of epistemology, but it is unclear whether Patterson knows what epistemology is. He doesn't even attempt to answer the basic questions of the field. And then as I'll go into, he lays out what the basic questions of the field are in epistemology. So that's it, right? That's essentially his whole point, is that he lies or doesn't understand, poor reading comprehension, I'm not sure, says this is meant to present the theory of epistemology. Absolutely false, completely 100% explicitly false. Okay, so the first page, I think is mostly fair. It's just kind of introductory stuff. He says, Patterson intends to debunk these skeptical arguments, which he kind of laid out chapter two. He says, the back cover of Square One declares, truth is discoverable. It's not popular to say, it's not popular to think, but you can be certain of it. That is indeed what's on the back cover. Okay, then he goes, chapter three, the best chapter in the book, really the central part of the book, responds to radical skepticism about logic, but his arguments are nothing new. Patterson uses the same argument students learn in week one of Philosophy 101. Criticisms of the basic rules of logic are self-refuting. Any argument according to invalidate logic presupposes the truth of the rules of logic. Poststructuralist or postmodernist complaints about logic are internally incoherent, fair enough. Okay, so this is exactly what I said was gonna happen last week. Wherever there's any engagement, this is one paragraph he gives, literally, any engagement with my actual claims is gonna be met with, yeah, yeah, it's true, but it's irrelevant and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I mean he did exactly what I said he was gonna do. Okay, so that's one paragraph where he starts off. Okay, well, I mean the standard laws of logic, yeah, here are no contradictions. Students learn this in Philosophy 101. Isn't that interesting? Because in my travels all around the world, there's all kinds of professional academics who disagree. I'll talk a little bit more about that later. So immediately he continues, Square One, throughout Square One, Patterson promises to help the reader discover certain truth. It's unclear to me, it is unclear to me whether Patterson understands the difference between, A, the certainty of a proposition itself, versus, B, the certainty of one's belief in that proposition. He often seems to conflate logical necessity with epistemic certainty, hysterical, because it's totally irrelevant to anything that I'm talking about. I specifically don't talk about that because it's not relevant to the goal of the book. Okay, so that's how he sets it up, right? Non-argument, I didn't make it. He's confused that I didn't talk about something that I didn't talk about, and then the elaboration on something I didn't talk about begins. To illustrate, consider true statement R, a properly constructed formula in sentential logic, which I've written, which I've write below in an abbreviated formula typo. R, colon, in three brackets, Q, and then of R, horseshoe, then P, then and, and P, three brackets, whatever, just a long mathematical formula. It says, in unabbreviated form, R is very long. R has 14,000 particles on the left side of the bi-conditional, and 15,000 particles on the right. Now, R is not only true, but true in all possible worlds. But since R is so darn long, even the world's best logician would have less than perfect epistemic certainty about the truth of R. She would reasonably worry, even if she uses a computer, that she made a mistake when she tried to calculate the truth value for R. This isn't because she doubts the validity of logic. Rather, she doubts herself, completely irrelevant, and he continues wasting space. Similar remarks apply to moderately difficult math problems. When I took my last math test in college, I knew my answers were either necessarily true or necessarily false. But I also know that I am fallible, so that my degree of credence in my answers was less than 100%. I doubt myself, not the universal validity of mathematics. This is an interesting point. So first of all, completely irrelevant, and again, just monologuing about stuff that I didn't write about explicitly. It's an interesting point because it demonstrates he's actually unaware of the philosophy of mathematics, because what he just said, I doubt myself, not the universal validity of mathematics. Like, wow, do you have a very robust theory of the philosophy of mathematics? That's a claim that probably a lot of mathematicians wouldn't even agree with. Okay. Then he says, literally, guys, I quote, Patterson glosses over or ignores this problem. Oh, I gloss over or ignore a problem that I explicitly don't write about. It's throughout this review. Because even if we grant, as we should, that logical truths are necessary truths, that doesn't mean we have epistemic certainty about all or even most of them. There are an infinite number of necessary truths in logic and math, or there aren't. But some of these are hard to figure out, so we can't be certain if we got them right, that we know all the true statements are necessarily true and false statements are necessarily false. Okay, so, again, not my argument. He doesn't want to deal with my argument, not my argument, blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you all about the theory of the thing that's totally unrelated to what I'm talking about. This is the paid review, right, embarrassing. So he says, this problem aside, Patterson tries and I think succeeds in refuting skepticism about some of the basic law, a basic axioms of logic. Is this where he starts talking about? Well, or actually the claims in my book are correct? No, end of sentence, next sentence. But what about skepticism about other beliefs? For example, how do I know I'm not a brain in a vat? May I trust my senses? Is it possible that I'm being radically deceived by a demon? If so, how can I be justified in thinking? I really do have two kids or that I'm 37 years old. The axioms of logic do little to answer these questions, and Patterson does even less. He continues, this means Patterson's critique of skepticism is rather narrow. To illustrate, consider these two forms of skepticism. Super-duper radical skepticism, he says, we can know nothing, not even the rules of logic or mathematical truths. We don't even know whether super-duper skepticism is justified, versus radical skepticism. We have knowledge of some mathematical and logical truths, some analytically true statements and some small number of metaphysical claims, but we are not justified in most of our beliefs about the outside world, such as the belief that the universe is more than two seconds old, or that we have hands, or that we're not at the matrix, or that Steve Patterson really did write square one, et cetera. Now listen to this guys, square one refutes what I call super-duper radical skepticism, but not radical skepticism. So Patterson is right that the truth is discoverable, but he doesn't show us how to discover most of the interesting truths. Okay, put on the brakes. Literally, the entire point of my book can be understood as refuting what he calls super-duper radical skepticism. It's not a book on metaphysics, it's not a book on a complete theory of epistemology. It's specifically in some extremely limited form we can know certain truths about the nature of all existent phenomena. Yep, and he says that project was accomplished, but it's irrelevant information. Yes, he's correct, yes he does actually do what he tries to do in his book, but it doesn't tell us about all the other stuff. And this my friends, if you're bored I don't blame you, this my friends is where my jaw dropped when I'm reading this. This is actually in the review guys, like words taken up, not about my ideas, your mind's gonna be blown. He says, okay, as I said before, square one is meant to present a theory of epistemology, but it's unclear whether Patterson knows what epistemology is. He does not even attempt to answer the basic questions in the field. I quote guys, let's briefly review. The subfield of epistemology studies the nature of knowledge. Its central questions includes A, B and C. A, what is knowledge? For instance, epistemologists generally agree that three necessary but not sufficient conditions for a person to know that P are that, one, the person must believe P, two, P must be true, and three, the person must be justified in believing in P. This brings us to the most important question in epistemology. Number two, what distinguishes justified from unjustified belief? Guys, he's literally, like my brain is exploding. He's literally asking, giving a review of basic questions in epistemology. What is knowledge? What distinguishes justified from unjustified belief? This is exactly what I said that was going to happen except in spades. That, it's like, wow, this is how philosophers do their work. This is how a philosophy book should be written. Yes, I recognize that the ideas in the book are actually true, but look at all the ideas that aren't in the book. Let me waste the whole entire review talking about ideas that aren't in the book. Okay, so, and he continues, guys. I mean, you can probably skip the next five minutes of this video if you wanna actually get into more concrete stuff. He says, B, what distinguishes justified from unjustified belief? For instance, if you believe, for instance, for instance, if you believe that penicillin kills bacteria because the evidence overwhelmingly shows that, then you are justified. If you believe that Santa is real on the basis of wishful thinking, you are not justified. Oh, is that what justified means? But there are plenty of interesting questions about what it takes to be justified. Oh, really, there are questions? Oh, tell me more. To be justified in believing P, it must be impossible for you to be wrong. How does evidence and scientific reasoning work? When does the testimony of others confer justification and when doesn't it? Am I justified at prima facie in trusting my senses? Patterson makes almost no attempt to answer either question A or B. He discusses some example of justified or unjustified belief, though, again, it's unclear whether Patterson understands the difference between the truth of a proposition and the epistemic justification of an individual person, that an individual person has, typo, in believing that proposition. Here are two arguments that, here are two facts about the basics of epistemology that are not in this book whatsoever because they're entirely outside the scope of the book. And you know what? Patterson makes almost no attempt to answer either question. What a shitty book. Oh, my friend, he continues. I'm not kidding. Epistemology also asks a third closely related question. The pretense of this man, literally in this book review of my book, right, this is what the man's been paid $1,000. He is writing about basic questions in epistemology that are not in my book. I read this and I laughed and I was actually entertaining the idea that this was like a draft version. Like maybe he accidentally sent the wrong file, or maybe this isn't even on my book. Like maybe this is something he was working up and the files mixed up in word or something. Like what the hell are you talking about? So epistemology also asks a third closely related question. Does knowledge have a structure? How do justified beliefs relate to one another? All right, here we go. There are many competing theories trying to answer this question. All such theories are either internalist or externalist. Internalist theories hold justification is entirely a function of an agent's mental states. While externalist theories hold, that justification also depends on conditions outside the agent's mind. For example, process, reliableism, an externalist theory, holds that belief is justified if and only if it comes through a truth tracking belief formation process. Internalist theories, oh my gosh, I read it and every time I read it, just my mind blows. Internalist theories are either doxastic or non-doxastic. Doxastic theories hold that whether a believing agent is justified is entirely a function of their beliefs. In contrast, non-doxastic internalist theories hold that justification depends not merely on the agent's beliefs, but also on our other mental states. Parentheses such as sensory perceptions rather than our beliefs about our sensory perceptions. Foundationalist doxastic theories, oh my gosh guys. I'm sorry, this is just insane. It's so transparent, I don't know why I'm worked up about it. This is what I expected, it's just way more obvious. It's just embarrassing, it's so utterly transparent. Foundationalist doxastic theories say that all beliefs are justified by being grounded in certain basic beliefs. Coherentist doxastic theories claim that there are no basic beliefs, but instead that the structure of belief is more like a web. All beliefs are justified by reference to other beliefs nearby in the web. For foundationalists, justification usually moves in one direction from basic to non-basic beliefs. For coherentists, justification moves in multiple directions at the same time. Beliefs can mutually support one another. Okay, now back to my book. Oh my gosh. And I quote, Patterson seems to want to defend a doxastic foundationalist theory of knowledge in square one. What? No, where in the world did I say that, right? This is the way that academics think because so few of them have any kind of intellectual independence. They view theories about philosophy and about the world and they pick from them like, oh, here are all the available theories possible. I'm reading a couple of specifically focused ideas over here, you must be trying to argue for doxastic foundationalist theory of knowledge. But if you're arguing for a doxastic foundationalist theory of knowledge, you'll notice that you didn't argue about all these other things. Let me waste space and talk about all these other things that you didn't argue about because you're trying to defend the foundationalist theory of knowledge. Complete and utter transparent bullshit nonsense. Nowhere, anywhere would I be so pretentious as to use some of these terminology, this terminology and waste, pressures, eye space or effort, talking about things that don't matter. But I don't claim to do any of this. This is just to complete, I don't know if you want to call it a lie, you want to call it, it's just self embarrassment, we'll call it. He says, Patterson laments, modern philosophy, okay, okay, disclaimer here. There I think is one redeeming, redeeming, there was one half truth in the book that we're about to get into here. So to his credit, it's not 100% bullshit, it's 99.9% bullshit. He says, he laments, modern philosophy is dominated by school, this is me talking, modern philosophy is dominated by schools of thought that deny the existence of foundations. They argue that worldviews aren't like trees, they're more like spider webs, each part is connected together with no clear hierarchy of importance. Each thread is fallible and can be removed without destroying the whole structure. Then Jason says, but there are two big problems with this claim. First, that's not a fair description of what coherentists actually think. In fact, most coherentists agree that the web of beliefs is structured. Yeah, I don't think I claimed anywhere that a web of beliefs isn't structured. A web has structured, doesn't it? Some beliefs carry more weight than others. Removing some beliefs like there is no external world would severely damage the web. Removing others like there was hot sauce in the fridge would not. I don't claim anything otherwise. Further, coherentists can actually, oh, further, coherentists can agree that beliefs are certain or express logically necessary claims though they deny these beliefs make, though they deny this makes such beliefs foundational. Okay, so now we get to the part of the book where, in my most generous, I could say, okay, well, maybe there is some actual truth nestled in here and some vagueness on my end, some inaccurate vagueness. He says, so, second, Patterson is right that foundationalism is now unpopular, but Pace Patterson so is coherentism. The Phil Papers Survey finds that only 26.2% of philosophy faculty accept any form of internalism while 43.7% accept some form of externalism. The numbers are roughly the same for specialists in epistemology. Patterson advises his readers to doubt themselves and vigorously check their premises. He should take his own advice if he bothered to research what philosophers think and why he wouldn't straw man the field. Okay, I could see an interpretation of what I've written as something like straw man the field, although I think that's pretty easy to see that's not the case. There's also, there's a conflation of foundationalism with denying these instances of foundations and here's, I have a very specific meaning though it may appear ambiguous to people who haven't already read the book. When I say they deny the existence of foundations, I would say that what I mean by that is they're denying the idea of certain objective truth that cannot possibly be wrong, absolute truth and belief in certainty. Now, this is interesting because this is one of those areas where because people in academia really don't, I claim most of them don't actually understand the basics of their field, Jason Brennan has admitted he's not an epistemologist, he doesn't have, he's not a specialist in this field so he doesn't actually know what the claims are in the field and here's why I say that. Somebody like Timothy Williamson who I interviewed at Oxford in person would be, you could call him a foundationalist, you could, he's the most classical logician pretty much on planet Earth and he's probably the most well-known like logician or epistemological logician in existence right now. He would probably respond to that and say, you know, yeah, of course I believe in the existence of foundational truths. However, when I spoke to him in person which Jason obviously hasn't, I pushed him and I said, are you willing to say that you are certain that the law of non-contradiction, let's say, can't be violated? Now, you would think it would follow if somebody who's a foundationalist or a classical logician, they would say, of course I'm certain that the law of non-contradiction is absolute but Timothy Williamson, the most prestigious logician currently teaching at Oxford was not willing to say that there is no possible way that in the future the law of identity and non-contradiction could be violated. So this is one of those things where he's outside as he's trying to get some kind of data on the field. I have had conversations, lots of conversations, totally happy sharing of the people who are interested. You can go through, I can think of a few on the top of my head where I talk to people in the field and you push them and they will deny the idea of absolute perfect certainty. So that's what I mean by denying the existence of foundations. I would admit that I could see an interpretation in which that's not accurate. So that's about as much credit as I can give Brennan throughout this. Okay, so get this guys, all right. This is, he continues, this is an actual quote. It's just so transparent. He says, all this aside, square one never actually gets around to defending foundationalism. He gives us lots of unoriginal metaphors about trees and roots, houses and foundations and the like. He declares in chapter three that logical axioms are among the foundations. But he never, get this, unbelievable. But he never tries to show us, one, which beliefs aside from logical axioms are basic? Are basic? Two, how these basic beliefs justify our non-basic beliefs? Or three, which mental states justify the majority of our non-mathematical beliefs? He therefore provides no evidence that our beliefs form a foundationalist structure. He responds to none of the common objections to foundationalism, he may be unaware of them. Now go back and listen to what I just read. He says, I never get around to defending foundationalism and I never try to show which beliefs aside from logical axioms are basic. I'm sorry, for anybody who's not an academic, anybody who's read the book or follow my work, the entire point of the book is to say the logical axioms are basic and everything else presupposes it. Future stuff about the connection between how we know the connection between the mind and the world, the mind and the external world, irrelevant to the book, completely 100% irrelevant. This is the perfect summarization of his entire point that no, I'm not defending foundationalism. I'm defending exactly the ideas I make in the book and no more. The idea that the book is super tightly focused and he even admitted what I try to accomplish with refuting super-duper extreme skepticism, I accomplish it. That logical axioms are absolute, they're necessary. All contradictions are necessarily false and of course he didn't talk about this. The laws of logic are unified in a profound way with all existence. Of course that didn't make it into the book. But I mean, yeah, there you have it. I respond to the none of the common objections to foundationalism because I'm not talking about foundationalism. All right, continuing. We're gonna get through most of this here. Patterson asserts that the axioms of logic are the foundations of our beliefs. He's right, of course, that our beliefs should be compatible with logic but it doesn't follow that these axioms somehow justify most of my beliefs or that my beliefs are grounded in logic in any interesting way. Listen to this. Now this is just logically embarrassing. This is just wrong. He says, so this is the time he actually engages with the ideas and when he embarrasses himself. He says, for example, I believe I own more than two guitars that I have brown hair, that I have 32 teeth, that Australia is bigger than Rhode Island and so on. If any of these beliefs violated the axioms of logic, they would be necessarily false. But other than that, there's no obvious way in logic. There's no obvious way, that typo, that logic provides the roots from which these beliefs grow. I literally contradicts himself in the same sentence. If any of these beliefs violated the axioms of logic, they would be necessarily false. But other than that, there's no obvious way that logic provides the roots from which these beliefs grow. I'm sorry, wait, what? If, okay, well I admit that all of my beliefs have to be logically coherent and if there's any kind of contradiction, I've made a mistake. But other than that, how does logic provide the root from which these beliefs grow? No, that's the point of the book. It's called square one, the foundations of knowledge. That's what it is. Square one, don't contradict yourself. Don't contradict yourself and this is why. And then he goes, but other than that, I don't see how logic provides the roots. Well, all any other additional claims are always going to be built on top of that same root that they have to be logically consistent. Not gonna, you can't talk about anything else. You can't talk about square two without presupposing square one. That's the point of the book. He can, so he continues. He says instead, the justification of these beliefs depends on various perceptual states I've had on the reliability of testimony I've ever seen from others and a whole host of other interesting issues which epistemologists routinely discuss and which Patterson mostly ignores. If Patterson intends to defend foundationalism, his project is radically incomplete. He's not even 1% of the way there. So, straw man the purpose of the goal. Totally, completely straw man it. And say, oh my gosh, you dumb fuck. If your intention was to do all of this, well gosh, you've only accomplished this part. Yeah, well that's the part I intended to accomplish. I have nothing right now in the book that says anything about more ideas and epistemology and foundationalism. Nope, I'm arguing for this part. He is arguing against this part and is shocked and is just appalled at how bad the book is because I don't argue for things that I don't argue for. Outrageous. He continues, listen, I just can't make it up. Patterson does not discuss attempts to refute rival epistemological theories. That's not some minor oversight. To defend foundationalism, he needs to show the theory does a better job explaining the phenomena than rival theories. Defending an epistemological theory is like selling a car. If you want us to buy the three series, you need to show us that it's better than C-Class. Okay, obviously, again, I don't need to say it again but I'm gonna say it again. Patterson does not discuss, just, I'll give you the quote. Patterson does not discuss attempt to refute rival epistemological, no, I'm sorry, that's not even the quote. Patterson does not discuss attempt to refute rival, I can't even give it to you. Patterson does not discuss attempt to refute rival epistemology theories. That's not some minor oversight. To defend foundationalism, right, so this is what he's doing, this is the whole thing, this is the little tactic. So again, this is the claims of the book, this is all the additional stuff that he's saying is non-existent because it's non-existent. And he says, oh my gosh, well in order to do all of this, you have to do all this other stuff and it's just not anywhere in the book. All that's in the book is this little tiny bit which everybody who's not intentionally trying to dismiss my argument or my career is going to recognize is obviously, obviously the point of the book. All right, so here we go. To summarize, Patterson does a decent job defeating what I call super-duper radical skepticism. In other words, Patterson, square one is correct and the laws of logic are indeed, the foundations of knowledge, they are indeed unified with existence and all contradictions are therefore necessarily false. Mission accomplished, that's what the book's about. He does almost nothing to defeat what I call radical skepticism. He does not actually bother to defend the foundationalist theory of knowledge. Still, all right, so now this is where he transitions, right? So he's trying to rescue himself here, right? I don't bother to defend ideas that I don't bother to defend because I don't bother to defend them because it's not the point of the book. He says, still, his book is beautifully written, takes only an hour to read, if you're an exceptionally fast reader and at least defeats super-duper radical skepticism, accomplishes the actual goal. We might ask, is this, now this is really the point of the review from his perspective. We might ask, is this at least a good book for a lay audience? He says, unfortunately, the answer is no for two big reasons. First, there are far better books, such as Thomas Nagel's The View From Nowhere or Michael Humor's Skepticism of the Veil of Perception, which are books dealing with issues that I'm not talking about. Second, Patterson's book is chock full of elementary errors. Nearly every page contains some major mistake or conflates two or more distinct ideas together. Lay people would be better off having no exposure to philosophy at all. Nearly every page contains some major mistake or conflates two or more distinct ideas together, and yet he has given us exactly no examples of this. In fact, he said, well, the actual ideas in the book are correct, but the ideas that aren't in the book aren't in the book. Extraordinary. So then, this is so funny. Now again, he tries to engage with the ideas in the book and again fails. For instance, on page 61, he says that, quote, the study was unbiased and, quote, the study was conducted properly are concepts, but these are propositions, not concepts. On page 83, he says, quote, mathematical truths, if carefully constructed, can also be immune from the possibility of error, but this once again conflates metaphysical slash logical necessity with epistemic certainty slash justification or the person's math skills. Mathematical truths cannot be an error, but I could be an error when I try to do a math problem or when I form beliefs about mathematics. On page 36, okay, so before he continues, let me respond to both of those because they're laughably mistaken. Essentially he says, I've mistaken propositions for concepts, which is hysterical because that's in a section of the book on conceptual reasoning. It has nothing to do with propositions. It's all about concepts on our head. The study was unbiased. Yes, I have a concept about that and I reason about the concept, not the proposition, laughable error. Then again, the mathematics thing, he just demonstrates he's unaware of the philosophy of mathematics. This is mathematical truths cannot be an error. Oh, in one way of reading it, well, that would be true. However, it's also the case that mathematicians have a gigantic amount of theory, which they claim are truths which are actually indeed in error. So yes, it's true. True things cannot be false, okay, but what mathematicians claim are true things are actually false. So again, but he's probably unaware of the foundations of mathematics, I would imagine. So he says this, all right. Here he goes, another tries to engage with the ideas. He says, on page 36, he discusses the phrase the elephant outside my window. He says that since there isn't actually an elephant outside his window, then the reverent of elephant is an idea or concept in somebody's head, but that's not right. To see why, let's use Russell's example. Suppose we say, quote, the present king of France is bald. If as Patterson claims, the definite description of the present king of France refers to an idea, then the sentence the present king of France is bald is true. After all, ideas are hairless, so therefore bald, but that's absurd. All right, so this is just basic confusion about how language works. I'm gonna address it in more detail in my next book, The Mind of the World, which is gonna have a big section on language, but not every proposition contains in it an external referent. As long as you specify what you're talking about, then sometimes the concept has an external referent, sometimes it doesn't. So if I'm talking, if I say, if the claim is the present king of France is bald, then if within that claim I add an external referent, I'm saying there is such a thing as the present king of France that exists separate of my conception and he is bald, that's just obviously false. So again, just, I think I actually explain that. I have to re-look at it. I think I actually kind of explain that even in that section, so that's pretty silly. All right, and now we get to the perfect cherry on top at the end of this awful review. There's a section in my book, a rather long section on why concepts come packaged together with other concepts. People get confused by treating conclusions in isolation. They don't recognize the premises and ideas that are stuck to those conclusions and therefore they prematurely dismiss things without analyzing those bundled concepts. It's, this is literally his refutation. He says, his treatments of the theory ladenness of observation or the problem of vagueness are superficial, though a lay audience won't know better. End quote. And that's literally the entirety of his statement. His treatments of theory ladenness of observation and the problem of vagueness are superficial, though a lay audience won't know any better. That's it, just a statement. These are superficial, nothing there. That's just laughably, laughably vacuous. There's nothing for me to respond to. What do you say? Hey, can you give a review for some of these ideas? Vacuous, and he moves on, laughable. He says, so in the end, square one is a beautifully written text. Oh, thank you. With lucid prose and delightful metaphors, wait, but they're unoriginal. But nearly every page contains a major mistake. What's new isn't good, and what's good isn't new. Five stars for style, one star for substance. So there you have it, folks. I mean, that's almost the entire review on all of its embarrassing glory. I mean, virtually nothing in the book was addressed. It's all about ideas that I explicitly didn't talk about. And when he actually engages with the ideas I did talk about, he either says, yeah, well, he actually accomplished what I tried to accomplish, or he makes elementary errors about issues that really aren't issues. Just for record, right? He made this Facebook post, and he's since deleted it for obvious reasons. He made this post, which actually explains a great deal of what isn't in the book. He said, chapters four and five are such disasters, I'm not even bothering to discuss them. They're like collections of shitty undergrad essays. Hey, undergrad, please write me four pages on the theory-ladeness of observation. Try to aim for a C grade. Bam, pages 63 to 66. Now, he literally says, chapters four and five are such disasters, I'm not even bothering to discuss them. Yes, the man was paid $1,000 for the review, right, maybe he's gonna be intellectually entitled, just no, he admits he's not even dealing with the majority of the book. I've got the book here. Let's do a little page count, shall we? So, chapters four and five are just under 70 pages, just under 70 pages of a 125-page book. They cover topics like conceptual reasoning, presuppositional analysis, theory versus data, deduction and validity, propositional logic, axiomatic deductive, certainty in the mind, logic games, poker in your mind, hierarchy of knowledge, mathematics, paradoxes and puzzles, that's chapter four, virtually no mention of anything. Chapter five starts off with a refutation or an explanation, a resolution, to the liar's paradox. As far as I know it's an original one, maybe somebody else has come up with it, I'm not sure. It's complete, it's incredibly important for anybody that's aware of epistemology or mathematics in how the liar's paradox gets abused as a true contradiction, not even mentioned. A resolution to liar's paradox, literally not even mentioned even the guy's supposed to be reviewing the book, laughable. I have one on the bittersweet paradox, which is the claim that people say they can experience logical contradictions. That's my refutation of that. There's a piece on the logic of nothing, on the problem of vagueness. Universal flux, which is the idea that things aren't actually the way they are because they're always turning into something else. I refute that. There's a piece on Eastern mysticism, quantum physics, this idea that he's probably unaware of, that you need to revise the laws of classical logic because of quantum physics. There's this movement a few decades ago called quantum logic, where they tried to revise some parts in classical logic. Lots of people abuse quantum physics to try to say that logical contradictions exist because of concept of superposition. So this is a refutation of that, not even mentioned because there's such disasters, he's not gonna bother to discuss them. Got a piece on the unknown world here and these things that he's not talking about, this idea that that's just your logic. I've got a great section on tautologies because tautologies in the world of professional philosophy are dismissed, abused, treated as trivially true. Well, they aren't, they're incredibly important and powerful and it doesn't even get a mention. And then the resolution to all paradoxes which is simply that they don't exist and I explained in the book why that's the case. And then at the end too, ironically enough, I've got this section called next steps. That square one is one piece of a theoretical puzzle. A robust worldview must contain more knowledge than epistemological knowledge. Logic tells us something profound in the abstract but it doesn't tell us much in the concrete. This is in the book guys. This book doesn't answer many questions in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, language, mathematics, religion, political theory, or ethics. Square one is the starting point, don't contradict yourself, but it's not the ending point. So I explicitly say this book is incredibly small in scope in the book itself but of course that doesn't get a mention. So what to do? What can we learn from this extraordinarily superficial review? Well, first of all, don't take my word for any of this. Read the book, you can get super cheap. You can find it online for free. I uploaded a earlier version that's got some typos in it but you can find it for free if you look. And then readers review and make up your own mind. The purpose of this was to demonstrate the vacuity of those pseudo-intellectuals who populate the academic system who are either not intellectually integratists in Jason Brennan's case or not intellectually competent which maybe it's the case of Joseph Brennan, I don't know. This is a perfect example of it. I intend to use this indefinitely as proof or a very clear demonstration of just how corrupt and ruined the system of academia is it's not where people go if they're interested in the world of ideas. This square one is a particularly interesting case because I wrote it with a layman in mind. If anybody can read this book in a matter of few hours, understand the points in the book and then they can read Jason Brennan's review, I don't know, in 20 minutes or something. That's all it takes to have a demonstration of the vacuity of Jason Brennan and at all than the people in the academic system. This isn't about Jason Brennan, this is about the academic system. You don't have to take my word for it. I don't have to just say these people are completely vacuous and can't grapple with ideas. Jason demonstrated it, right? I gave the guy enough rope and he hung himself with it. Now there's one group of people that is probably gonna read Jason Brennan's review and go, oh my gosh, it was so good. Those are people who are not gonna read my book. Those are people who have outsourced their critical thank you to somebody else. They're not intellectuals, but they're probably in academia, of course. And they're probably gonna think this is some refutation. It's a refutation of ideas that explicitly are not in the book, but they're not gonna recognize that because they're not gonna read my book. They're obviously not gonna read it with an open mind. So in the process, I'm sure people who are already gonna hate me and want me to be wrong are gonna dance around and act like they may, this is some good argument, but it's just gonna further put a nail on the coffin of this old archaic academic system which is populated with a bunch of charlatans. All right, so there you have it. I'm sure it was difficult to follow along, me reading it to you rather than you reading it to yourself. Very shortly, it will be online. You can read it in all of its glory. I intend to talk about this for quite a long time. Maybe in his head, he was thinking that if he tries to embarrass me, I'm gonna like stop doing what I'm doing or something or think that it was. I mean, he knows this review is terrible. Unless he's genuinely incompetent, I don't think he's genuinely incompetent. He knows that this is a bundle of lies with an agenda and I've caught him in it and now everybody who has an open mind who wants to actually make up their own mind is gonna have overwhelming evidence that that's the case. So, a lot more to say on the topic. Thanks for sticking around. Thank you so much for supporting the crowdfunding thing. All in all, after the Indiegogo fee, I think I'll have paid him 60 bucks. 60 bucks to have this, would you pay an academic who's part of a system that you despise and think is filled with a bunch of fools? Would you pay somebody 60 bucks to embarrass themselves to anybody who's got an open mind? Yes, I would pay that, I would pay it again. And what I get to say, what these academics can't say because it's in their interest not to say, is I get to say, look, don't take my word for it. Assume that I'm totally wrong, prove me wrong. You, don't trust my ethos, don't trust his ethos. You, make up your own mind. And if you do that, welcome aboard.