It has no basis in psychological discourse, politics is by nature illogical. So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors (what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label) is like creating a card game that only let's the house win.
As a work, it’s political philosophy. Not science. Which makes it odd as a counterpoint to arguing the article in question is too aloof.
(Also, conflating irrational and illogical is unfounded. Nature is irrational. Per Caplan, individual agents may find it advantageous to act illogically. It doesn’t follow that one can’t use logic or rational thought to characterize the system.)
It's philosophy, Michael Huemer is a philosopher, not a "political philosopher" which is oxymoronic. Nature is neither rational nor irrational, nor is it logical or illogical.
By nature, irrational things or behaviors are not logical, which means politics has no basis in logic-derived axioms as propagated by Alexander.
Please adhere to a scientific, or axiom-based argument. Your replies are extremely irrelevant.
To conclude the thread, yes, you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish, through to things which can't reason at all, whether they be oceans or planets. Moreover, one can logically characterise that which behaves illogically in the same way we can mathematically characterise and constrain the behaviour of fractals and fluids and other objects which are, fundamentally, impossible to precisely describe.
Math has no relationship to behavior, nor do almost all terms used to describe behavior, engineers should have already grasped cog-sci is folk science.
If engineers remain uneducated in this way, you'll become sycophants led as lemmings by cult figures like Alexander.
We're talking about "you obviously can reason about politics in the same way one can reason about anything else that doesn't behave rationally, like fish"
Lol what? You just posted a cog-sci op ed whose first third rambles on being refused publication decades prior. (The second two thirds pretends behavioural neutoanatomy, where we stimulate brain structures to see what happens, doesn’t exist.)
You don't even grasp what that paper is. It's not an op-ed, it's a theory/review article with empirical evidence that's increased many percentages since it was refused publication, now it's a primary approach in neurobiology. Read carefully.
Math may be able to model those things momentarily, but ultimately "all models are wrong yet some are helpful" so YES math has no relationship to behavior, it cannot reference it. It can only symbolically (arbitrarily) model it.
> ultimately "all models are wrong yet some are helpful" so YES math has no relationship to behavior, it cannot reference it. It can only symbolically (arbitrarily) model it
Sure, nothing is knowable. Great if you’re trying to get social sciences funding. Not super useful for anything practical.
It is, but only for those who know neither logic nor politics.
> So creating logic games from arbitrary metaphors
So don't create them.
> arbitrary metaphors [are] what politics is based in and especially when each side is calling the other with the same arbitrary label.
That's true for the R/D circus but it's not true for politics in general, it's not a law of nature, it's just a fact of present day politics.
More importantly, framing that fact as something inevitable renders the framer incapable of recognizing its utmost importance as a piece of evidence that can help a diligent investigator uncover the political truths hidden behind it.
The framer has no valid framework. There are no such things as empirically valid statements in political science, as the field is composed of subjective narratives. There are no such things as political truths.
Oh, yes it is, there's history to learn from, just because you're unaware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
> The framer has no valid framework.
If you understood the comment you replied to, you'd realize that "the framer" there refers to you, so your statement above means "mallowdram has no valid framework". Ironically, it's true - you lack a valid framework because you lack knowledge of logic, history and politics.
I'm an anthropologist who's delivered papers at the presidential level at the AAA, which outside of authoring monographs is about as high as it gets. Now I'm training to be a neurobiologist. Not only do I know what science and logic is, it becomes obvious you're not trained in these.
https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/papers/irrationality.htm