I'm also not sure how his arguments work with super prosaic statements like "hey the sky's blue" or "fuck me the sky's purple!" - context seems pretty irrelevant to the truth of statements like that (though of course it could change the inferences we'd make based on them), and I'm not quite sure how to avoid their overwhelming force.

Some truth conditions are extremely straightforward to verify, like "the sky is blue" or "holy shit come outside the sky is fucking purple wtf". The choice to share certain information might be loaded with implicit context and ulterior motives.

And after all, when two people talk, there's normally some context that both people are operating in, some common set of topics that are being discussed, and both sides would notionally agree about what would support of refute a claim.

It just seems that the article was written with an eye towards beliefs and facts asserted within large sprawling worldviews, and didn't stop to consider the opposite extreme of everyday, extremely mundane and tangible statements.

Meh. I see the point being made (and I definitely agree with the skepticism about blockchain fact pools and fact-checking services), but it seems a bit... lightweight?

Like, it doesn't seem to tackle evidence, or facts-as-provisional-beliefs. He also doesn't seem to distinguish between the way general members of the public use "it's a fact" and the way an expert on a topic might use it, the later of which (at least in a scientific context) I've generally found to implicitly be saying "this is the only position reasonable to hold based on our current understanding and evidence", which comes with an implicit invitation to rebut with additional information.

Any discussion of this topic needs to be account for statements with very clear, and easily verified truth conditions. While I don't think the author is encouraging a perspective of complete truth-relativism, the framework he's constructed seems unable to escape it. Perhaps if he'd dug more into the context portion of his triangle, and interrogated how true statements interact with selective framing, he might be able to make a better distinction?

Thank you for writing this. I wrote a big long rambly comment tearing into the article, and this feels like the perfect (and better written) complement to all the points I made.

This article is... god-awful. It read's like what a second year undergrad writes assuming they're the first person to ever call bullshit on the ideas they're being presented with (or not even realising that calling bullshit was part of the reason they'd been presented with those ideas in the first place). It's a very "everyone else are just sheeple" vibe.

Starting off with the Plato section, it's talked about how Socrates seems to reply over-literally to Thrasymachus' claim regarding rulers, failing to understand the rhetorical point being illustrated. But Thrasymachus himself probably wasn't even real, or at least was heavily fictionalised by the dialogue - the whole thing itself is a rhetorical device! It's not that I suspect Plato was trying to make Socrates look like a bad thinking, it's that the whole dialogue itself is just an excuse to exposit ideas, not necessarily a realist account of two blokes arguing.

And the end thesis has a gigantic gap in it as well. Philosophy is a field filled with people who love to argue, deep arguments, petty argument, pedantic arguments, broad arguments, and are generally well trained to pick apart each other's reasoning (and strongly incentivised too - bringing down a big philosophical theory is a great way to make a name for yourself). For a "great" philosopher's flawed work to survive in that environment, one of two things must be true. Its flaws must be either so subtle as to require another "great" philosopher to come around to unpick them, or the works must have value in spite of their obvious issues.

The issues picked up on in the article are, well, not new. Hell, the issues with the categorical imperative are so famous that anyone studying formal ethics will learn about it. These are very old observations. It's then reasonable to assume that, given how philosophers tend to bicker, dissect and scrutinise ideas, that these thinkers must hold some value in spite of their very well known flaws.

The article tries to sweep a whole lot under the rug by simply describing these thinkers ideas as "interesting", in a semi-contemptuous way. But most "interesting" ideas put forward by blowhards soon lose people's attention, and many philosophers considered important for a while fall into obscurity. The article doesn't really answer, why THESE thinkers, THESE ideas, in spite of all the scrutiny? Fun hypotheticals alone don't tend to secure people a place in the canon. It completely fails to tackle its own questions by just using the label "interesting" as though that explains anything. Most gradiose ideas with shit reasoning fall away - so in what different way are the "great" philosophers "interesting" that their ideas are kept around in spite of their known mistakes?

My issue is not that these thinkers are sacrosanct and shouldn't be questioned. It's that this article is so goddamned adolescent that it seems to assume the author is the first person to claim the emperor has no clothes, and doesn't seem to even think to pause and then check if that's true.