Glad I could clear things up :) Brandom's someone I've spent a lot of time reading and talking with others about in my studies, so I'm always happy to talk about him more.

At what timestamp does he mention Brandom? I don't remember Brandom coming up in the video (though given the context I did almost hear 'Brandom' when he talked about 'rebranding' the redundancy theory of truth as the deflationary theory). Brandom's anaphoric/prosentential theory of truth is definitely a version of deflationism but I don't know if Blackburn specifically had Brandom in mind when he mentioned deflationism at the end (again, unless I missed that moment or there's a longer version of this video?).

In any case, I don't think your worry applies to Brandom's account of truth. Yes, he does take the content of our thoughts and utterances to depend on how those discursive acts make explicit norms within larger social practices. However, those are specifically practices of giving and asking for reasons (his "deontic scorekeeping") and the structure of that scorekeeping in the cases of science, morality, and a host of everyday topics - e.g. what food is in the fridge, to take Blackburn's example - is specifically one of representing objects (his "de re ascriptions of propositional attitudes"). Those two features alone easily makes room for a minority of moral activists in a community to be right and even for an entire community to be wrong, since by making claims that answer not just to one another (in a community) but to objects they specifically point to limitations in individual perspectives on the truth and even to all of the perspectives the community has so far.

None of this would look like "tapping into something" in a sense that looks like a direct intuition of the moral good but it would involve responding to the objective moral features of the world, just in a way that involves a fundamentally perspectival access to those objective truths and a need to arrive at that truth by learning from the perspectives of others (including perspectives that no one in one's community has yet reached).

> But it seems like we have a sense that moral activism would-have-been-right so many times, and times when it is not the sociocultural norm.

Where here or in his written work does Blackburn imply otherwise?

Other commenters are telling you nonsense about how Descartes argues for an external world.

His argument in the Meditations first establishes, as you and others said, that he exists but then goes from there to establish that he has an idea of an infinite being, an idea that he argues could only come from an actual infinite being that exists independently of his own mind (basically, the idea's content is too much to have ever come from any finite being like himself).

From there, he establishes that this being must have created him and must be good, so would not have created him with mental faculties that would be unable to detect their own errors. Since a systematic falsity of perception would be an undetectable error, our senses must not be systematically false. Therefore, at least some of the external objects we perceive must exist and any mistakes we make about what objects are actually out there must be able to be corrected, as we do in natural philosophy.

Could you say what you think Sam Harris' argument is? Asserting that we are puppets or that our attempts to control our thoughts are just illusions are both just ways of re-asserting the conclusion he is trying to defend or ways of asserting implications of that conclusion (in other words, it's just begging the question). What do you take his argument to be for the conclusion that we are not free or that determinism makes us not free?

I'm specifically wondering if he has any more than just an intuition that being caused to do something is being unfree, more than an uncritical, uninterrogated sense that this is just obvious.

Honestly, I think he just means 'phenomenon' in the sense that the Beatles were a phenomenon (i.e. a cultural phenomenon) but instead of giving an example of what he meant he just gives his own (questionable) analysis of what it is for something to be a cultural phenomenon.

I'm also confused why he'd say something isn't real just because it's a cultural phenomenon or even just because its a set of things held together by their cultural meaning. It would also make no sense to say it isn't real if what he meant is that it's a social construct but I digress.

The initial comment was that Shermer represents some kind of brain rot that's common in people who accept liberalism, one tied to also accepting scientism. How would that not imply that his views are a good source for what is involved in liberalism and its acceptance? But even without that, I'm not sure where you're coming from. I didn't say that Shermer doesn't give a doxography of liberalism and that's the problem; I said his views aren't representative of liberalism and aren't a good point from which to generalize about liberalism. Being representative of liberalism only requires giving an account of liberalism that is, like the person I replied to said, nuanced but also reflective of what liberalism actually involves. I don't see why you'd think I meant giving a doxography.

> When talking about humans, it's probably bad practice to generalize from what you think and what you want to everybody else.

That's why I initially said 'truth' (or getting moral matters right); I don't know why you replied as if I hadn't said that. I only added what I would say IF you just meant appeal to readers because even though you seemed to mean truth what you were describing looked a lot more like appeal or acceptability. What readers think "relates to their own lives" and is "useful" is a great sign of the appeal of that writing to the readers but doesn't tend to have much to do with truth/correctness. For example, if I'm dissatisfied with sex with my husband and care more about that satisfaction than his happiness, I'm probably not going to find someone's writings about why I shouldn't cheat on my husband terribly useful, no matter how rightly or wisely that case is made.

Truth is a totally different question from representing a particular philosophical position in an accurate or nuanced way. It is indeed the case for academic philosophers that no one should take them as authorities on what is true about moral questions. Philosophical topics aren't the kinds of topic where it makes sense to treat anyone, academic or popular, as an authority on what is true or false. I'm just talking about treating someone as a good source for what a particular philosophical position even is or in this case for a careful, nuanced account of liberalism and its connections to other views (like scientism).

And if you didn't mean truth (or getting, say, moral, practical, and political questions right) but are just talking about appeal or acceptability to readers, then, absolutely, pop philosophers are much better than academic philosophers for that. Pop philosophers are usually better than academics at writing something that leads people who read it to feel like they have a better understanding about what is right and about how they should live. The same goes for pop science writers: someone who knows how to throw around the word 'quantum' in an engaging way that speaks to what readers want to hear are generally better at writing something that appeals to readers than an academic is (though, as with pop philosophy, some of these popular science writers are also experts who know what they're talking about).

Sure, we can use the word 'philosopher' that way if we like but then pointing out that Shermer is a philosopher doesn't say much about whether he's a good source for understanding liberalism or even whether he has nuanced views on the topic.

In any case, we should question a person's understanding of liberalism if most of their picture of it comes from writers, like Shermer, who had little to no expert guidance in learning about political philosophy (or had that only incidentally - I have no idea if Shermer took an undergrad course in political philosophy here or there while he was getting his psychology and history of science degrees).

To be honest, I wouldn't even call Shermer a philosopher, other than maybe a "pop philosopher". He doesn't have a degree in philosophy or have any ties to any philosophy department and I've never seen his political views discussed by any philosophers. He's just not a significant political thinker in general, except for a popular audience, and so I wouldn't take anything he says to be indicative of liberalism as a serious area of thought. At minimum, if you're forming a negative opinion of liberalism because of him or other pop philosophers, including because of how they present the history of liberal thought, I'd encourage you to withhold judgement instead.

Now, I have no clue if Shermer's individualism looks anything like what any major liberal philosopher accepts. But one difference from serious liberalism that is relevant to this thread is his commitment to scientism. That's just incidentally part of his broader collection of views and not at all a part of liberalism itself (along with his atheism). In fact, I can't think of any liberal philosophers who defend scientism or defend any connection between liberalism and scientism (notably for such a modern topic as scientism, it would be nonsense to attribute scientism to Hayek, Nozick, or Rawls). This connection seems like an invention of non-philosophical, "pop" discourse about liberalism. Where are you getting the idea that scientism isn't an orthogonal question from liberalism?

You've misunderstood me. I'm not asking where you got the idea that Shermer is or calls himself a liberal from. I'm asking where you got the idea that he is representative of liberalism and I'm asking where you got this dismissive generalization of liberalism from. I mean that as a legitimate question; I've never seen anyone treat Shermer as a major liberal philosopher (emphasis here on "major"), so I'm genuinely wondering where someone could get that idea.

Not unrelatedly, none of the major liberal philosophers that I know of are tied to scientism or anything that seems fair to call "the Brain Worms", if anything major liberal philosophers and even libertarian philosophers (most relevantly and evidently, Nozick and Hayek) are opposed to scientism, so I'm also unsure where you got this impression from independently of Shermer and of other cultural commentators/pop philosophers who profess being "classical liberals".

> ...Philosophical Liberalism...

Huh? Shermer and this kind of scientism are hardly representative of liberalism. Where are you getting this generalization from?