 Hey everybody, this is episode number six of Patterson in Pursuit. I am your host, Steve Patterson. This episode is going to be a little bit different than the other one so far. Occasionally I'm going to be doing like a breakdown episode where I have a nervous breakdown and start crying and then I'll record it so everybody can listen. No, it's going to be breaking down the interviews that I've done so far, some of the highlights, some of the controversies, some ideas that I want to expand upon. And I also want this to be a little bit less formal too. So the first three interviews that I'm going to be breaking down are interviews with Dr. Emerson Westicott, Dr. Brian Kaplan, and Dr. John Sturr. Covered a lot of info here so I'm going to go through it pretty quick. I'll make sure to play some soundbites too for the relevant parts. The first highlight in the interview with Dr. Westicott was a way that he phrased questions in epistemology. I thought he really made an excellent point here. We're talking about the concept of objective truth and he's saying, yes, I'm very comfortable with saying there's objective truth just colloquially. But when we start being more precise, talking about a more deep philosophical level, then things are a little bit less clear. Statements are true when they correspond to reality, when they describe it accurately. But that's fine at the level of every discourse. It's not so good at a deeper philosophical level because then the philosopher asks, OK, how do we decide whether a statement corresponds to reality accurately describes it? And then you immediately have to say, well, we have certain criteria. We use epistemic norms, such as coherence with our other beliefs, the evidence of our senses, the belief that we are not dreaming, the belief that our senses are working. And even to some extent, things like simplicity, all things being equal, simple theories are supposed to be better. That's our comms razor. Or even aesthetic criteria, even Einstein argued that sometimes the beauty of a theory might be an argument in its favor. And so we then say, OK, we work with these criteria. How do we know that the criteria we're working with are the best ones? I think that was very well phrased. And then for the next 10 minutes or so, we keep talking about this idea and he keeps coming back to this idea of kind of the social construction of epistemic norms, that you have different group of people have different epistemic norms. And I kept trying to say, well, does that matter? Can we have a set of epistemic norms that is just simply objectively superior to another set of epistemic norms, even if those other people aren't persuaded by your epistemic norms? Can you still say, well, it doesn't matter, you're wrong and I'm right. But then what's left of your original question there? When you said, OK, do I believe in objective truth, right? And in a kind of mundane sense, yes. But then in that deeper philosophical sense, I'm saying I OK, I believe that there are criteria which will lead me to beliefs which are very useful for coping with the world. There are people who don't share those criteria, they're just benighted fools. But according to traditional philosophy, shouldn't I doesn't it say something if I can't actually prove my point to them? If all I can say is they're fools. I also thought this was interesting because it kind of reflects on our also our different political beliefs, which we didn't get into in the interview. But Dr. Westacott is or at least definitely was a socialist and I am a libertarian. And we have kind of different perspectives on community. So I think he was very uncomfortable with the idea of, OK, well, yes, we can say you have, you know, dumb epistemic norms and, you know, you're a benighted fool. Well, great. Where does that get me? And for me, I'm very comfortable with that conclusion. I think, in fact, that conclusion comes up all over the place. It's very reasonable to conclude 90% of the time that people have objectively poor justification for their beliefs, so be it. And they're not going to be persuaded by superior arguments. And that's just the way it is. So my goal and my motivation is to discover truth, whatever the truth is. And if that means accurately identifying a group of people as having a crappy justification for their beliefs, then then so be it. OK, so the other thing I want to talk about in this interview is this idea of foundation versus framework. So Dr. Westacott and I eventually agreed that, yes, you can have some absolutely certain knowledge about a very limited number of things in the universe. And in my own work, I use this term foundational all the time. I say this is foundational knowledge and he was very hesitant about this. As I said before, I'm not I'm not comfortable with the word foundational because that implies that then that's a kind of Cartesianism. That implies that you're going to build the rest of human knowledge. You're going to rest it on that foundation. And I don't necessarily see that. I don't, you know, with the hope that some of the certainty is going to see through. Now, for me and in my own analysis, not only am I comfortable with this idea of a foundation, I think it's desirable. I think it makes sense to try to actively build your worldview based on bedrock foundations. In fact, this is really a central idea in my upcoming book, Square One, The Foundations of Knowledge, where I'm saying there is really an idea out there, we'll call it logic, that you can base everything else on with kind of a vertical hierarchy that ultimately there is something at the bottom. It's not the spider web. It's not a framework. It is absolute bedrock from which everything follows. However, I do agree that this is not perfectly satisfactory when you're talking about less certain things. So like the existence of the external world, the validity of our sense perception, all kinds of empirical scientific truths. With those truths, you do have to have kind of the spider web mentality. You have, OK, given reasonable assumptions about the existence of the external world and about physics, then we derive all these other things that come back to kind of the center of the web. But we always have to be open to revision. It just might be the case that the physical world doesn't exist. Is it a logical possibility? Yes, is it something that I'm I'm OK with taking a leap of faith and saying, for these various reasons, I have a positive belief in the existence of the external world? Yes. But for me, I don't shy away from the idea of axiomatic deductive reasoning. You find axioms that you know to be true and you use logical deduction to understand what certainly follows from those true premises. And the last thing that I thought was really interesting, really struck me as interesting just because of our past conversations on these topics, where Dr. Westcott and I again both agreed that there is such a thing as the objectivity of subjectivity, which is the way that I phrase it, that in other words, the mind does have access to some kind of a God's eye perspective. So we can say, for example, I am experiencing the flavor of vanilla ice cream in my mouth right now. And this is something that is obviously subjective, but you can phrase it objectively. You could say, so there is at least one sense perception of vanilla ice cream taking place in the universe. This is something that is objective. So for all of our subjective experience or all the subjective phenomena that we experience, it comes packaged with this access to the realization that such phenomena are happening in the universe, objectively speaking. Yeah, I mean, I'll sort of accept that that and again, it's a kind of Cartesian point in a way that I accept the indubitability of subjective experience and therefore in a sense that from the standpoint of the universe, from the God's eye point of view, something's going on. There is something rather than nothing. That's very exciting. It's a start. So then later on in our conversation, we start talking about the philosophy of mind. Dr. Westcott is also in agreement that regardless of how complete your physical description of some system is, there can be information loss, which is the way that I like to put it. So you can contrast two scenarios, one billiard balls on a table and the other putting your hand on a hot stove. Right. When you see the movement of billiard balls on a table describing the position, the location, the momentum of each individual ball and the bits that constitute the balls, you have a full description of the phenomenon that's taking place. But when you have somebody puts their hand on a hot stove, you can describe every bit of matter, all of the energy that's being transmitted through your hand, through your nervous system, up into your brain, all the firing of neurons, you'd have a complete description. And yet you still lack some information. You lack a gigantic amount of information, which is how it feels to be in that circumstance is not something that can ever be described using purely physicalist terminology. He also came back to this concept of emergence several times. And it's not something that I'll go into here. I certainly will in more detail in the future, but the the traditional conception of emergence in the philosophy of mind, I find bollocks and I'll explain it in more detail later, but I actually view it as kind of mysticism that you arrange these atoms in a particular way when then you summon this categorically different thing into existence that is subjective experience in a mind. And then when you rearrange the puzzle pieces, it disappears. I'm not persuaded by that. But it's it's not something I'm going to cover right now. Okay, so let's move on to the interview I have with Dr. Kaplan. There are so many good things that you can take away here. One that I can only speak from personal experience is when you start getting rid of the romance that is surrounding politics and the nationalism that surrounds our education and our being as citizens in the United States or wherever country you're from, the political system looks sillier and sillier and you have more and more kind of farcical situations coming up. So for example, why should we expect that a demonstrably uneducated electorate should make correct economic policy decisions? Why? When your average person on the street doesn't understand anything about basic economics, would we think that they're going to understand the complexities of tariffs and subsidies and the effects thereof on on the local and the global economy? Why should we expect people that have very, very limited amounts of knowledge in public issues? Why should we think, oh, if we get enough of them in the room together and they all vote and they raise their hand, out's going to pop a great political decision? I mean, it strikes me as kind of absurd. In terms of the least radical thing you do, I'm a big fan of just stopping and encouraging a voting to stop all the social pressure to vote. There is good evidence that people who that's out there in general, you know, more educated and better informed people will like that it votes and the effect of get out the vote campaigns is to reduce the average quality that people are voting. So I'd say really be better to send the message of if you haven't carefully studied all the following areas, please, as a civic service, do not vote. So that that will get you thrown out of polite company to say such a thing isn't kind of what you're saying. To the extent that we have a a democracy, it would be better for less educated people to be ruled by their more educated neighbors. Yes, so the simple thing is just to refrain voluntarily in the same way that if there's a an operating room, we don't say, you know, it doesn't matter where you make the incision, just make an incision somewhere. Instead, we say, look, only someone who knows what he's doing really should be involved here. Other people as other people would be irresponsible for other people to participate when they don't know what they're doing. With political theory in particular, I think there really is a gigantic bastion of mystical thinking that people have so much emotion and drama tied up in this concept of civic duty to vote. Oh, you must vote. Oh, you have to vote. It's like practically speaking, that just doesn't make a whole lot of sense that we should structure our society around a majority of people raising their hand or not raising their hand on any particular issue. The other thing that I really took away from this interview was when Dr. Kaplan was talking about the current production of legal services in the market. We already have private courts. We already have private police. We already have this system of private arbitration. And so it's not too hard to come up with theories, imagining that we just move the needle that direction. There are already, these are already areas where the private sector does a lot. So for police, there are more security guards than police in this country. Again, for courts, private arbitration is a huge deal. If you have a problem in your credit card statements or with a company, you don't go and take them to court, you don't call up your credit card company and they have a system where they resolve it all on their own. And then similarly, so laws as well, there are all sorts of private organizations that have their own rules. The way that we're including, say if you want to, if you want to be able to use credit cards with the Visa Corporation, you have to agree to a bunch of the rules in order to participate. Right. So, you know, so, and you know, and these things are all, you know, these are not just small, little, little, little, little weird, weird, weird anomalies. These are actually, you know, these are large areas where the private sector is already doing a lot of this. And when I'm talking with people about political theory, about anarchism, I get caught up in theoretical arguments. That's what I personally find persuasive and really important. But it's so much simpler to avoid a lot of the theory and just say, look, I'm not going to tell you all the theoretical arguments of how private police might work. Demonstratively speaking, this is how they work. So let's put aside these silly objections that, oh, you know, private courts could never work. Yes, they could certainly work and they already do. And the last thing I talked with Dr. Kaplan about is something that I could spend an eternity talking about, which is the educational system. As you guys know, I am extremely critical of specifically higher education and I appreciated really what Dr. Kaplan said at the end of the interview when I asked him about whether or not you need formal education to grapple with the biggest ideas. Do you think that there's a way just purely intellectually to learn about and fully grasp the ideas as an autodidact or is there some there is there is there a necessary need for formal education in order to grapple with the deepest concepts? Yes, so definitely no need for formal education. There I think there is generally a need to talk to other people who know what they're talking about. So like, you know, I think there is a danger in reading all by yourself in total isolation and not communicating with other people. But this can be remedied just by reaching out to people and again, the internet is great for this. But yes, to whether you need formal education to do this, no, totally you don't. So I mean, not like there are plenty of people who become experts in subjects where they've never taken classes in it. My former colleague or my, you know, say he's passed away, Gordon Tullick. He was one of the most famous economists of the 20th century. He I think he never actually even took a class in economics. Wow. But he read a lot and he talked to a lot of people who who who were already experts. And so he became an expert in self that way. You know, I would say is if I only knew what I've learned in classrooms, I would just know nothing practically. It would just be like like the level that my ignorance would just be so appalling. Maybe I could still be a professor despite that, because I could have learned just enough to go and extend in academic literature and get some publications. But in terms of knowing anything about the world, like what you're to what what you're taught in classrooms is such thin gruel that you just you just really know next to nothing. And all I can do is just echo that that no, you certainly certainly do not need the magic of the classroom. You don't need the the atmosphere of being on campus or access to a local library. You know, minutes down the road just walking to on campus. You don't need any of those things in the 21st century. If you want to grapple with the biggest ideas, then we have the tools available to understand outside of academia. And I very strongly suggest people do so. So OK, so the last interview that I want to break down is the interview I have with Dr. John Stewart, who's the American pragmatist at Emory University in Atlanta. So in this interview for the first half hour, I thought I was following along pretty well. And then things got a bit confusing for me. It seemed like from my perspective, the pragmatist position was stated fairly clearly. And then it seemed like some of the claims were contradictory. And then they would go back to to what I thought was a version of the inclaimed. And then they would seem to be apparently contradictory. Of course, this may be my own lack of understanding and grasping the subtleties of what's being communicated. But I've rearranged some of the parts of this interviews that you'll hear what I think are the core claims of pragmatism. And then you'll hear some of the questions that I ask him that seem to contradict what he was saying earlier. But if when you listen to this, if you get what he's saying and it makes sense to you and there's a piece of the puzzle that you think I'm missing, please make sure to leave a comment, shoot me an email and we'll talk about it. Because I think this topic is really essential to understand for everybody involved. So this first clip is just a short summarization of what appears to be the central claim in pragmatism. One of the things that William James points out in principles of psychology is that there is no object. There is nothing except as it presents itself to someone. Right. And so there is no independent reality. But at the same time, there is no internal mental state. There is no state of consciousness except as of something else. OK. And so there's no way to disassociate the in and the out, the self and the object. These things are integrally, irreducibly, reciprocally linked. OK. So that response made the question crop up in my head, OK, why is it that there appears to be this thing that we consider the external world separate of our experience of it? And I think his response also is very consistent with what he initially laid out. So intuitively, I would think if so, we disagree about some some something in the world. Sure. And let's say that, you know, I say it's blue and you say it's red. Does doesn't that imply then that there is such a thing as an external reality that we are evaluating and saying there is something that has these particular properties that if you evaluate it differently than mine, your evaluation might be wrong and my mind might be right. So no, the answer is no to that. There's no way, right? In other words, you could take this as sort of a pragmatic challenge and you could understand it as tell me about anything as it is independent of your telling it. You know, it's kind of good luck with that one, right? Because the minute that you begin to describe it, you are using your experience, you're presenting it from your point of view. Absent conscious awareness and experience, like if it were the case that there were no human beings, would there be any thing? Right. So what if we don't say human beings? What if we sort of say sentient beings? Sure. OK. Yeah. OK. So would there be any things? Yeah. No. Right. Depending upon what you mean by things, right? So if what you mean by that is this, if you mean what if there was some bomb that killed everyone off, but left a bunch of stuff standing? Do we have reason to believe that then there would be a bunch of stuff standing? Yes. But that's not separate from experience. That's only later than experience. But there's no there's no experiencer. There is an experiencer, but there is not an experiencer at that time. OK. And this is where I start to kind of scratch my head a little bit that the claim is without any experiencer, there would still be things, even though there's not an experiencer in the present. There was an experience in the past or there will be an experience in the fruit's future. And so therefore there's still stuff that strikes me as a bit odd. And this leads to even a more particular way to phrase the question, you know, is there anything out there outside of our experience of it absent any experiencer? It's kind of maybe even a better way than sentience. Just absent any experiencer? Isn't there then you wouldn't even be able to talk about a thing. You couldn't name a thing. You couldn't describe that you couldn't use any word for it. But but that's only if we presuppose the pragmatist starting point. No, no, no. There are no independent things separate of our experience. No, see, again, that's not a very helpful way to put it. There are all kinds of things that are separate in many ways from us, right? There's all kinds of independences. Our experience shows that there's all kinds of independences. OK, right. But but they're not but they're not independent of experience per se of all experience. That's that's what I was trying to get at was that was so right. And so you have to be careful not to let the intuition, which is more than intuition, it's verified all the time that experience shows that our life shows that there's various kinds of independences of things. There's some things that don't depend on others. But but independent of experience is the key one that I was trying to understand. So what I'm trying to say is that something makes sense within experience is taken by many analytical philosophers or what you're calling rationalists as a claim about experience as a whole, which makes no sense whatsoever. I'm sorry, can you say that one more time? Yeah. So the fact that a distinction makes sense within a framework, yes, within the framework of life or experience or something doesn't mean that those distinctions then make sense applied to the whole. And again, I just the answer doesn't strike me as that clear was clear before. And now it strikes me as a little bit less clear. OK, so this led to my question. If there's no metaphysical differences between things, there's no external reality which is divided in any way, then is it the case that there are different beings that inhabit it? Because intuitively what I would think is if there are genuine metaphysically different beings in this reality, then that would imply that indeed there is some kind of objective world out there which has distinctions between things that if there are two different things, one could be independent of the other's experience. The self doesn't have it's not a separate substantial thing. It doesn't have a history. It is a history. It's a series of events. Is it independent from any other series of events? Sure. But is there? It's experience shows that it is, right? In other words, it's why we say that that was your childhood rather than mine, right? It's because that set of experiences stands in a certain relation to your being here talking now that my being here talking now doesn't have to it. But isn't that doesn't that presuppose then that there is this thing that is kind of the external world in which there are two different chains of experience operating? If it depends on what you mean by external, right? So again, the premise is always going to say you need to define your terms before I can tell you what you're saying is true or false. So if you mean by external, something that experience shows doesn't depend upon my existence in certain ways, of course, that's so. Well, well, isn't that a isn't that a metaphysical dualism to say that there are there is a chain of events that is separate from another chain of events like experiences? No. All right. So that answer is officially where I'm confused that we can say that the yes, there are different chains of experience and yes, and experience shows that there are these two different things. But there's not a metaphysical distinction between the two of them. This I admit, I don't understand. And then he can he his explanation. I also can't say that I understand. So take a listen and see what you think, right? It would be like saying how many things are there in this room? Is it suppose I so I'm gone way past dualism, I'll say there's 17, right? Or there's three, right? How many kinds of things are there, right? And the premise view is that is a question about how is it helpful to make certain distinctions rather than others? Right, I could walk into a class and say how many kinds of students are there in here? One answer could be two, there's male and female. The other answer could be four, there's freshman sophomore, right? Somebody could say there's actually six people who are six feet tall, six feet one, six feet two, isn't that cleared up by just precise language? So yeah, it's exactly right, which is so that this whole language of external, objective, subjective, merely experienced that will be cleared up according to the practice if we if we're more careful about it. Okay, so let's take that answer for what it is. And what I again thought would then follow the apparently I was wrong is that you get some kind of solipsistic world in the sense that all that there is the experience that is going on that without this metaphysical dualism all that you have left is just one thing. But apparently that doesn't follow either. So my just in the way I'm trying to understand this, it seems like there is almost a like a solipsistic flavor to this in the sense that opposite of that. Right? It's an outside of the self, it's other things, right? You're not the prime minister don't take that seriously as a philosophical problem. But I thought you just said that there was there were no other things. In other words, it's just what you mean by other, right? There's clearly other things than me. My experience shows that the world is full of all kinds of things that are not me. Yes, but that's just a statement about your experience, right? So it's not just a statement about the experience, it's a statement about the world. See, if you keep saying that, you don't grasp it does not. It's a statement about the world. There are in the world many things. So the conclusion is there are many things in the world. But do those things don't have any objectively independent metaphysical existence from each other? I don't know, I'm confused. So I thought I would ask him to try to get down to this idea of the objective metaphysical distinction between things in the world. I thought, okay, well, he clearly from my perspective is a being that is having a subjective experience. And from I also am a being that is having a subjective experience. And I would say there's a metaphysical distinction between the two objectively that indeed we're kind of in our own separate internal conscious realms. And so I thought I would ask him, well, what when he's referencing me, what is he referencing? Is he is he referencing me as an independent being with my own internal world? Or is he referencing me as he appears to see me? When Dr. Stur is looking at the person across from the room, what is that thing? And again, the purpose of this is to try to say, well, if that thing is is metaphysically separate from me, then there's got to be this this mediating realm in which you can have a different entities. But what are you referencing when you are referencing me? You're just referencing experience, right? Again, I'm just referencing experience. No, I'm referencing you. What is that? What are you? Yeah. Okay, well, so again, we could define you in a bunch of ways, right? We could go to the chemist and say, What is you? And we could get once you're sort of this combination of these chemicals in this, right? We can go to the historian and say you're this person who was born here and then went to school there and lived here and right, we could do that. So I tried to present my own worldview that I find compelling, which is that there is this objective external world separate of our experiences. And it and what I was thinking is, well, it's peculiar if it's the case, there is no such world. Then doesn't that mean there is nothing beyond our experience in the sense that like way out in the cosmos, things that we've never experienced, we have no experience of it all? Don't those things still exist? He was his response. There are some features of existence, which I am not experiencing. One hopes that that's true. And it seems obviously so, but I don't have any experience of it. So why would I say that? Right. So it sounds sort of like Donald Rumsfeld of there's the the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Right. And so there are things that you're not now experiencing that you have some knowledge of. Yes, what about but it also seems reasonable to say that there are things that don't even have knowledge. Exactly. Exactly. And that's why the primates think that inquiry is never done. But why would we have that belief in the first place? Isn't that completely unjustified if we don't have any experience of it? No, no, we have a great deal of experience of it. We have a great deal of experience of the inadequacy of our own knowledge of the world being more than we know. Yes, but but of of existent things that we have absolutely no experience, like some some great way out in the cosmos that I just have no conception of anything. I have a positive belief that such types of things exist. See that's wrong because you just conceived it. You said I have no conception of it. And then you just described it as being way out in the cosmos. I have no conception of it outside of the most abstract. So what you're saying is, yeah, so what you're saying is I have a very little conception of it. What do I have an experience of it? No, not yet. Well, so there's the there's a difference that there's a difference between the experiential knowledge and conceptual knowledge. Well, there are probably lots of differences between them, but not in the way that you made it. Now, if you're saying there are things that I haven't discovered, that's both true of you individually, right? As a kid growing up, there's like things you haven't experienced, right? And it's also true of human beings generally, meaning we have experience of some things that Aristotle didn't have experience of. Right? And so the idea that there are things yet to be discovered is not an incoherent notion. It's completely linked to experience. It's just saying that these would be objects of a future experience, right? But we don't have the experience, not we don't have it yet. Okay, so those are things, right? Those are things waiting to be discovered. And again, I find this difficult to stomach the idea that those things out there still exist because they're objects of a future experience. And that strikes me as you got some explaining to do how things can be in existence because in the future they're going to be experienced by an experiencer. Okay, so there were really two central things that I wanted to break down here. One was the this metaphysical idea of existence separate from experience. And the other was the pragmatist claim about rationalism, about disproving some particular epistemology using pure theory. How would you respond to something like the rationalists who might say the pragmatic approach to understanding and interpreting your experiences is something which is objectively wrong when they say that that's just hubris on the part of the rationalist or that that's that's just their way of going about it. Yeah, hubris applied as a personality trait. Maybe so, right? Maybe hubris, but also just wrong. I mean, like flat out wrong. And so several of the pragmatists, William James is a good example, really spends his life arguing against rationalists that their arguments don't work. He's very careful. He's very analytical. He takes about those arguments and shows like these arguments don't reach the conclusion. So I just said the right. And so part of the pragmatist view here is that you cannot prove any philosophy, right? This is a pragmatist like central point. You cannot prove any philosophy, including pragmatism in theory. Okay, you cannot prove any philosophy, including pragmatism in theory. Well, then that's what I want to say. Can we apply pragmatism to pragmatism? Yeah. Right. And so the exactly and the pragmatists do apply pragmatism to pragmatism. They're one of the few philosophies I think that actually are self consistent that way. And it's why they end up being pluralists, right? So that they don't claim anybody who is not a pragmatist is therefore wrong. But didn't you just claim that about the rationalist? No, what the what the rationalist I believe generally we talk about which which folks were talking about, right? But what rationalism tends to believe, at least historically, is that it can present arguments as arguments, as theories, as philosophies that show that other philosophies are mistaken. Yes. Okay, that's what pragmatism denies. But isn't that what it's isn't that what it's doing? No, no, no, no, no, no, it's not pregnant. At no point in any of the pragmatist writing do they believe that they have made the case for pragmatism. Well, but they're presenting a case against rationalism and they're not making the case against rationalism, they're making the case against rationalisms for closing other possibilities. But say that that's a central tenet of that's what yeah, which is why then they're showing that that view is wrong. But I thought you said you're not showing that it's wrong in theory, they're showing that it's wrong in practice, right? And there was what the pragmatist says, what the pragmatist says is to you that the ultimate test of any belief, whether we call it rationalist pregnancy, anything else doesn't matter, it could be about pens, cliffs, movies, whatever. The test of this, the determination of whether a belief is true or false is going to be a matter of consequences. Okay, right? Not origins. So what are the results that we get? Okay, so can I, that's the last thing I want to try to rephrase that. And if I do it inaccurately, please. So the pragmatist is saying that there's no way to prove in theory, yes, that a particular epistemology is true, objectively true, right, that even, okay, isn't that itself a theoretical claim about epistemology? Right. It would be, it could be taken that way, right? Which would be a kind of anti pragmatist way to understand it. Or it could be taken a pragmatic way, as a claim about does experience show that this is so or not. That's really the core that I object to and maybe don't understand is this idea that you can't use theory to disprove theory. So the pragmatist isn't willing to say this is wrong on purely theoretical grounds. But there seems to be one exception, which is the rationalist that tries to prove or disprove particular theories only using theory that seems like the only theoretically unjustified way of going about things. So you're saying there is essentially no purely theoretical argument that is going to convince you of rationalism. Not just convincing sounds like a rhetorical thing, right? So I will somebody be convinced. Persuaded. Which also sounds rhetorical, right? Like let me persuade you, let me manipulate you, right? And the question is logically, it never works. That you can never prove any kind of rationalist conclusion without invoking rationalist premises. And I don't think it could be phrased more clearly than that. The claim is that logically, this never works. You cannot prove the rationalist conclusions without invoking the rationalist premises. Now it might have been that that particular word, maybe that particular phrase was said loosely because that is a theoretical, it's purely a theoretical claim to say that X is logically impossible, is not a claim, is not an empirical claim that is a purely theoretical claim. So maybe that was a misstep there, but it certainly doesn't strike me as consistent with everything else that's being claimed. But on that note, I think that's enough breakdown for today. I really hope that you guys enjoy this a little bit more in depth kind of breaking down the thought process here. So if you enjoy this, make sure to subscribe on iTunes and Stitcher. And as always, if you want to contribute to the show, make sure to check out patreon.com slash Steve Patterson. You can sign up to become a patron of rationalist philosophy. If you like this project, all you do is pledge one dollar of support. So whenever I produce a new show like this, you pledge a dollar and then when we get enough people together, it will allow this show to continue indefinitely in the future. So thanks so much for listening. Have a good day.