Secular Superstitions: Why Unfalsifiable Narratives Are HarmfulBy Ariel Pontes
February 16, 2022
Is diamond harder than steel? Does 2 + 2 = 4? Sure. But there are some statements that we can’t evaluate as either true or false. Some of them are obviously meaningless (for example, the present king of France is bald or colourless green ideas sleep furiously). But others may be experienced as meaningful even though, on closer analysis, they cannot be objectively evaluated as true or false. These include assertions about ethics (for example, rich people deserve their wealth) and obscurantisms (for example, Deepak Chopra’s pronouncement that attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation). Some philosophers, most notably the logical positivists, referred to such statements as “meaningless,” “nonsense” or “pseudo-statements.” It is easy enough to see that it is meaningless to talk about colourless green ideas or the present king of a republic, but there are meaningless statements that look meaningful at first, and that require effort to be unmasked as meaningless.
Recognising Pseudo-Profound BullshitIn recent years, some philosophers and psychologists have settled on a technical term to describe meaningless statements that are intended to sound meaningful: they simply call it bullshit. In a 2015 study, “On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit,” researchers tested participants’ reactions to a variety of statements. Some (such as “attention and intention are the mechanisms of manifestation”) were made by the New Age guru Deepak Chopra, who has a reputation for saying things that sound profound without actually meaning anything. Others had been randomly generated by online tools (such as “Wisdom of Chopra” and “New Age Bullshit Generator”) and were designed to parody such pronouncements, while others were unrelated to Chopra, but were chosen because they sounded somewhat inspirational (such as, “A wet person does not fear the rain”), and some that did not sound at all inspirational (such as “Newborn babies require constant attention”).
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Assessing Truth Value: The Rise of Logical Positivism In nineteenth-century Europe, most philosophy taught in universities was dominated by the work of theistic thinkers, and even though many of them did not write in explicitly theistic terms, mysticism still pervaded their work. However, in the early twentieth century, as scientific thinking became more dominant in academia, many started to find it difficult to reconcile such thinking with the mystical metaphysical concepts of prominent Christian philosophers such as Hegel, known for his philosophy of absolute idealism. Indeed, today, some of Hegel’s writing can sound like a nineteenth-century version of Deepak Chopra. For example:
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Source:
https://areomagazine.com/2022/02/16/secular-superstitions/
