Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, Ctd.

Hypothesis: Every deduction is a concealed induction. (See below)

The previous post, Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, offered a beginning discussion of foundations—of the grounds of reason.

This post attempts elementary notes on the nature of fact and truth, from the Enlightenment liberal perspective. As before, the chief contestant for prevailing concept of truth is the archaic assumption implied by Plato's philosophic idealism. This is that entities have essences, that truth is a knowledge of essences, and thus that truth is absolute. A corollary is that what is true is necessarily so.

Liberalism's concept of truth is closely related to the perspective of empirical science: Truth is probabilistic. If a fact arrived at by induction is falsifiable—Karl Popper's famous proposition—it cannot be absolute.

Let's try a couple of definitions derived from the premise that truth is empirical and probabilistic:

1. Truth is a function of the current state of our knowledge; and
2. A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

(1) fits the Newton/Einstein case. At one time Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was considered the ultimate revelation of the laws of nature. 'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light,' exclaimed Alexander Pope. But a glitch was discovered:

A long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System was that the orbit of Mercury did not behave as required by Newton's equations.

The work of Albert Einstein revealed what had happened. Newton's conclusions were based on  observations of non-relativistic phenomena, and worked satisfactorily under those conditions. The Principia was a brilliant analysis of the knowledge of its time. Newton's formulae are still widely used in a wide number of practical cases, where velocity is not even close to the speed of light, and the sort of powerful close-to-a-star gravity well experienced by Mercury is not a factor. In such non-relativistic conditions, Newton's math is far simpler.

Newton's treatment of the regularities of nature is a subset of Einstein's treatment of the regularities of nature. Einstein's propositions and equations apply under a much wider set of conditions. (There was a debate in the USENET discussion group rec.arts.books, where humanities professors could not understand scientists' argument, that to say that Newton was "wrong" and Einstein was "right" is simplistic. Degrees of confidence does not fit an outlook derived essentially from Plato.)

It could be said that Plato's philosophical idealism was an attempt to solve the problem of induction* by deriving all knowledge from deduction, thereby achieving metaphysical certitude. (His model may have been theoretical mathematics, which some mathematicians see as a great structure of a priori truths existing before and outside of the "reality" we think we experience. The idea or Form is a similar a priori construction which is immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchanging, and imperceptible to the senses.)

The scientific/liberal response is that there are no absolutes, and metaphysical certitude is a will-o-the-wisp. The Forms, after all, are off in some invisible Platonic heaven (which only the Philosopher can see). By contrast, "The moderns [liberals] built on low but solid ground" (Leo Strauss quoted by Allan Bloom). Induction can give results which are certain for all practical purposes. Did you ever run across a street dodging cars? In doing so, you wagered your life on where moving cars would be (an ephemeral truth if there ever was one) when you went.

Hypothesis: Plato's effort was doomed from the start for the reason that it is impossible to start from deduction because every deduction is a concealed induction. A familiar universal principle, i.e. deduction, from theoretical mathematics such as "2 plus 2 equals 4" becomes, in applied mathematics,** an induction, such as "2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges." This induction is falsifiable. All it would require is a case where a grocery clerk put 2 oranges in a sack, then another 2 oranges, and the sack, upon inspection, contained any other quantity than 4 oranges.***

"2 plus 2 equals 4" is not necessarily true; if it were, it would be a prophecy about the future which we mortals are not permitted to make. (Nevertheless, most of us do not anticipate a disjuncture between integer mathematics and household purchases.)

For a more wide-ranging discussion of liberal modernity's objection to Plato, see Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?



(*) The problem of induction is that it consists of conclusions derived from observation of physical reality (which Plato calls the realm of "appearances") and, according to Plato, produces "opinion" rather than "knowledge." A future observation could contradict those on which the induction is based—that is the problem.

(**) One can say that Plato engaged in equivocation, acting as if applied mathematics possessed the immutability of theoretical mathematics. (Equivocation: When a key term is used in two different senses in the same passage without acknowledgement. An example of legitimate equivocation (because the reader is aware of it) is Pascal's The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.)

(***) Perhaps this would be an example of definition (2) above: A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

Liberalism in the 21st Century Ctd: The Left

Yesterday's post, Enlightenment Liberalism in the 21st Century,  argued, in effect, that liberalism is The Peaceable Kingdom. As a line which appeared in rec.arts.books (USENET) years ago asserted, “Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power.” No one should be subject to the will of another. Liberalism is about efficacy and optimum outcomes* rather than “power.”**

This is in direct contradiction to powerful  “intellectual” themes from the 19th Century Central European intellectual avant-garde—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—which still are surprisingly influential in the academic humanities today. (“A left intellectual ideology which is backwards in respect to liberal modernity is one of the paradoxes of western civilization.”)

The Founders could not have warned against the illiberal mind-set of the left, because the left was a reaction against the Enlightenment which came after them.

Perhaps the most important difference between liberalism and the ideology of the left is that liberalism rejects us-vs-them thinking. The most famous three words of liberalism are those which begin the Constitution: “We the People.” By contrast, for the left there is always an oppressor. The end of the Communist Manifesto issues an implied call to war for an unnamed entity which is responsible for “your chains.” The language is everywhere. For example, Multiculturalism on Campus: Theory, Models, and Practices, states:

The revolution to the left engages people to become part of a utopian vision that is liberating ... one group subjugates and dominates (i.e., the oppressor from the right) and the other group is collaborative and empowering (i.e., the oppressed from the left).

In What's So Bad about Hate? (NYT) blogger Andrew Sullivan notes some of the consequences of this polar thinking:

The theorists behind these "isms" want to ascribe all blame to one group in society — the "oppressors" — and render specific others — the "victims" — completely blameless. And they want to do this in order in part to side unequivocally with the underdog. But it doesn't take a genius to see how this approach, too, can generate its own form of bias. It can justify blanket condemnations of whole groups of people — white straight males for example — purely because of the color of their skin or the nature of their sexual orientation. And it can condescendingly ascribe innocence to whole groups of others. It does exactly what hate does: it hammers the uniqueness of each individual into the anvil of group identity. And it postures morally over the result.

At its extreme, us-vs-them thinking has an anti-intellectual effect. Ideas are subject to blanket rejection on ad hominem grounds if articulated by the “other.” The tendency is suggested by Stephen Carter: “There is a partisanship that involves rooting for my side, and there is a partisanship that involves insisting that my side can do no wrong, that all the bad guys are on the other side.”

Eventually it becomes an attempt to limit the range of thought:

Almost any argument about race, gender, Israel, or the war is now apt to be infected by a spirit of self-righteous grievance and demonization. Passionate disagreement isn’t sufficient; bad faith must be imputed to one’s opponents: skepticism of affirmative action equals racism, antiwar sentiment equals anti-Americanism (or terrorist sympathy), criticism of Israel is by definition anti-Semitic, and so on. More and more people think they’re entitled to the right not just to ignore or disapprove, but to veto and banish. - Kurt Andersen

Once again, for liberalism, language is critically important.



(*) It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. - Steven Den Beste, denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2004/05/Inelegance.shtml (Emphasis added)

(**) “Live dangerously!” Nietzsche taught: “Live in conflict with your equals and with yourselves! Be robbers and ravagers as long as you cannot be rulers and owners.” Nothing could be further from the liberal spirit.

Ten Years After: A USENET Conversation Between Liberal and Libertarian Viewpoints

From http://adissentersnotes.blogspot.com/2012/07/conscience-and-language-orwell.html, "See Waring’s great blog post on libertarianism: delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/10/libertarian-ponies-what-still-may-be-the-best-weblog-post-ever.html"

"Michael S. Morris" <msmo...@netdirect.net> wrote:
>                            Friday, the 3rd of October, 2003

Mike wrote below:
>You don't understand Aristotle either. The idea is not that
>anybody has absolute knowledge of anything. The idea is that
>knowledge is possible, and therefore absolute knowledge is
>in the theoretical game.

You did not say absolute knowledge is possible. If it isn't, why
should it be in the theoretical game?

You have a greater difficulty than this, however. In order for there
to be a final truth, the fine detail of the universe would probably
have to be by definition finite. Even if finite (is that a provable
proposition?) it would also have to be within the grasp of human
understanding. It is for reasons such as this that I proposed, in
Liberalism Reviewed Part 1, "a suggested liberal definition of truth
as 'that conclusion from the currently available information which,
when acted on, tends to produce the expected result.'" Truth, or as
you say, knowledge, is a function of the current state of our best
observations and reasoning.

Your position, by contrast, is a concealed form of Platonism. "The
highest vocation of the soul in Platonism is to 'perceive the eternal
order of things'--to which the soul must passively adapt or conform."
(Richard Wolin, _The Terms of Cultural Criticism_ p. 37)

As Lee Smolin says in a chapter heading of _Three Roads to Quantum
Gravity_, reality consists of processes, not things. Knowledge--
truth--is a process. As such, your "absolute knowledge" is a
reification which should not be in the theoretical game. And as I have
suggested in previous articles, intellectual propositions of this sort
have unanticipated political consequences. Wolin: "As a species of
first philosophy, ontology posits an immutable order of being. Far
from there being anything intrinsically 'emancipatory' about this
ideal, it is a conception fully compatible with the most authoritarian
and rigid forms of political life." Wolin continues:

  With the transition from an "ontology" to "epistemology"
  inaugurated by Descartes, "reason" and "truth" need no longer
  be accepted on the basis of a spurious, supramundane claim to
  ontological primacy--for example, the claim that the "good"
  would be somehow a priori lodged in the "order of Being"; a
  claim to which human agents must simply submit. Instead, all
  truth claims and claims to right must be legitimated through
  the mediating agency of individual insight. The seventeenth-
  century shift from ontology to epistemology, therefore,
  displays profound affinities with the foundational values of
  political modernity: freedom, autonomy, and self-legislation.
   (p. 38)

Truth is not "out there" in the sense in which you argue. Truth is an
interaction between us and a non-subjective, extra-human "out there"
which constrains the range of legitimate propositions which we may
formulate about it but which does not, as such, determine those
propositions.

And that is the end-point of "absolute knowledge is in the theoretical
game": a determinism which is in remarkable contrast to your
libertarian wishes.

A second note: This clearly is not absolutism (I'm arguing against it)
but it is also not (moral) relativism, as you charge below. "Morality
is, roughly, what human beings owe to one another," Avishai Margalit
observed recently in the New York Review of Books. I've claimed
previously in the Liberalism Reviewed series that ethical positions
are roughly as described by Aristotle: something arrived at by the
analysis of cases.

Our ethics are a function of our growing understanding of the
right--of learning how not to do wrong to each other. This occurs by
our noting the consequences of our behavior and manners--our
consideration and restraint--towards each other.

What you wrote below contains a profound misunderstanding:
  The thing Nietzsche introduces is autonomy--the idea that there
  is no "moral code" and all there really are are possible "moral
  codes" which the victors make up at their convenience to pat
  themselves on the back for being "good", and [then] to kick the
  losers in the dirt for being "evil."

First, autonomy is independence, not imposition (nor sovereignty, a
word you overuse). "As I would not be a slave," Lincoln said, "so I
would not be a master." Therefore: As I would exercise autonomy, so I
would not constrain the autonomy of others (which would show that I do
not believe in autonomy).

Second, Nietzsche, and moral relativists generally, take an
intellectually trivial position. They do not consider the possibility
that ethical propositions may have functional value. Very strong
arguments can be formulated, for example, that murder is
dysfunctional: disruptive, destructive of human capital,
destabilizing, producing a climate of fear and inaction (or conversely
an internecine feud), etc. The relativists' argumentative inadequacy
in this regard signifies that moral relativism is not worthy of
critical inspection.

Mike wrote below:
>I do not wish to pretend to some agnostocism about whether,
>in some societies, it might be morally good to go and
>commit murder of those around one.

Nor do I. As Travis Porco wrote here some years back, the wrongness of
murder is "certain for all practical purposes." This is not, as
Platonists will tell you, an absolute position. It is merely, as
Gordon Fitch once noted, the "good enough." My point is that practical
certainty is adequate for a human ethics, and that it avoids the
cognitive and intellectual traps consequent on any claim of
metaphysical certitude, to wit: You can't prove that; and therefore
you must retreat to nihilism.

Mike wrote below:
>The whole point of Natural Law is precisely that it is that part of moral law
>which does not depend upon Revelation. It's what intelligent men anywhere
>and everywhere have understood to be ethically right in the absence of
>divine guidance.

Bravo! Unfortunately I cannot take seriously the claim that this is
your actual position. On October 22 you wrote:

  You really are willing to call
  liberalism anything that has gotten divorced from the doctrine 
  of the inalienable Rights of Man? Even in the face of the fact
  that the Declaration of Independence---the founding document of
  political liberalism if there ever was one---declares the Rights
  are the whole beginning and end of government in the first
  place?

You forgot that the passage in reference begins "We hold these truths
. . ." Before "these truths" the authors of the Declaration placed the
active human intelligence which is continuously formulating truths. A
reasonable observer will deduce from the tone of your statements about
"the doctrine" that when you think of "Rights" you are thinking of "an
immutable order of being [...] to which human agents must simply
submit."

You claim that Natural Law and Rights are "what intelligent men
anywhere and everywhere have understood to be ethically right" as if
it was not open-ended. But that can't be right. From everything we
know of what they said and did the greatest minds prior to the modern
era--Plato, Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth, St. Paul--never clearly
formulated what seems morally obvious to us: the ethical status of
slavery.

Their position must have seemed to their contemporaries--if not to
they themselves--beyond discussion. So as to your charge: "You are
saying nothing is beyond argument" I repeat, That is exactly what I
mean. I do not fear argument or free thought or discussion. That is
how we got beyond the ancients on the question of slavery. Do we
know--indeed can we know--that our descendants will not better us in
some way which _we_ cannot now envision?

End-Stuff:

Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power
of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a
given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of
argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom,
based on some self-arrogated superior quality.
 - F. A. Hayek, "Why I Am Not A Conservative" [PDF]

www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/09/after-strange-gods/?pagination=false

 [Margalit cite above]

First Quarter 2013 Wrap

The year began with the lengthy Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture, which noted the fashionable nonsense peddled by many humanities academics. It accused today's humanities departments of

• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Two articles on "passing" defended the right to personal independence, the first of which noted, as differences between liberalism and the assumptions of the left:

It's a free country, and this means that Barry Goldwater gets to be an Episcopalian and Madeleine Albright gets to live as a gentile (when a media discussion arose concerning the fact that Albright is of Jewish descent, someone remarked, "She doesn't want to know from Jewish"). People of African-American descent who don't look black are free to just live as a person and need not deal every day with the identity issues which would arise if they did not pass as white. ...

Privacy is a freedom of enormous value. Privacy means that one is free from being arbitrarily identified with some group, supposed to be in dire plight. It means that one is free from being saddled by others, or by what John Stuart Mill called "social tyranny," with an involuntary obligation to alleviate that plight. As Jim Sleeper observed in Liberal Racism, the assumption that each person of color is to be treated as a "racial delegate" is just wrong. ...

A signature difference between liberal and left is that liberal does not care about identity. As mentioned in these pages before, liberalism is public and civil. One's subculture, race, gender, religion or irreligion, esthetic taste, etc., may be freely enjoyed or ignored under the aegis of the liberal society, but are not otherwise of public concern. "We live . . . free," as Pericles said.

Theoretical Mathematics vs Empirical Mathematics developed a proposition from MetaIntellectual Analysis, above:

Absent convincing evidence to the contrary, it is best to consider every deduction a concealed induction. The general principles of the theoretical approach (and of what was once called Theory) were arrived at by experience. They can in principle be falsified by a future experience. ...

The "problem of induction" is that what is demonstrated by experience can never provide metaphysical certitude. It can be certain for all practical purposes. We can even bet our lives on it (and we do, every day). But that perfect knowledge we would like to have is not attainable. ...

The error of Plato's abstract theory of reality is that it assumes that the real can start with deduction, escaping the provisional nature of the physical. This is an elemental intellectual error.

Executive Power and Imminent Threat argued that administration drone policy looked suspiciously like outmoded notions of the Benevolent Despot:

Non-imminent imminence, extra-judicial capital punishment by the chief executive of people who have not been charged with a crime, are part of a lack of transparency concealing arbitrary exercise of power solely on the basis of the presumed decency, trustworthiness, and inerrant ability to detect guilt, of the person in power. ...
This is not a new theory. It was in vogue for centuries before the rise of modern liberal democracies, before the American colonies rose up against similar presumption of the English King. It is the theory of the Benevolent Despot—the fond hope that a wise and good absolute ruler might be the best form of government of all. ...
It should not be difficult to see what is wrong with this. The question is whether this is a free country. The question is whether we are a free people, with our freedom protected by the indispensable concomitant of freedom, the rule of law.   

"Be proud, do not apologize" noted dissenters to politicized Islam such as Ibn Warraq, who declared:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. ... Do not apologize. This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. ... The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. ... By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values. [Original link no longer functional: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html]

Wafa Sultan drew attention to a barbarism which cannot be excused under the rubric of "faith":

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values? expanded on another theme of MetaIntellectual Analysis, citing an intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews:

The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds.

The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, in the spirit of John Adams' "Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition," discussed some of the signs and wonders of science, including Euler's intriguing equation, e^(πι) = -1, and rejected the claim of runaway scientism that science disproves free will, noting "science is [not] an a priori discipline."

A reprise of the discussion of movement conservatism cruelty argued:

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor. 

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will? argues that there is a Platonist source for this anti-humanist position:

The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science. ...

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

In The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is a certain kind of high-flown anti-intellectualism reminded the Dissenter:

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

(See The First Six Months' Wrap for earlier posts.)

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will?

In The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom there was, among other things, a discussion of "the recurrent claim that science 'proves' that free will is an illusion." In an article in The Weekly Standard, "The Heretic," Andrew Ferguson reviews Thomas Nagel's analysis of the same issue in his recent book Mind and Cosmos. "Contemporary philosophers," Ferguson writes,

have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, ... Philosophers call this common view the “manifest image.” Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science—this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics—tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory.

What this means, Ferguson continues, is that as geneticist Francis Crick wrote, “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Does this sound familiar? In a previous post we cited a liberal philosopher of science:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Plato's Realm Of Forms states, "this material world ... can only present appearances, which lead us to form opinions, rather than knowledge." The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science.

The contradiction requires a certain amount of double talk:

["Cognitive scientist" and "philosopher of mind"] Daniel Dennett ... [cautioned that] we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

Ferguson adds:

The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” [Nagel] says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

It leads to a reductio ad absurdum:

[Nagel's] working assumption is, in today’s intellectual climate, radical: If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious.

One of the things which make science wonderful is that science does not have the concept of heresy. A scientist may advance a hypothesis which is new and unorthodox if he or she can back it up. Reproducible experiment has moved our science well beyond Newtonian science, for example. But as Ferguson notes, materialism "is a premise of science, not a finding."

The Dissenter previously argued, "Science seeks those areas of reality which are deterministic. When successful, this approach produces valid predictions. But nothing about this approach proves that all of reality—and behavior—is deterministic." Ferguson makes a related argument:

Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.
But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion. 

It is not surprising that these proudly immoralist materialists don't walk the talk:

Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.

And finally there's that problem of the missing reproducible experiment. Is there an experiment which proves that free will (and by implication the possibility of choosing to do good rather than evil) is an illusion? What would such an experiment look like?

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?

‘The theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy.’ (cited by Alvin Lim, below)

The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. - Plato, Laws 659a-b (also Laws 659a-b)

Whatever quibbles one might want to offer about Lilla's discussion of particular cases, he makes a convincing case that the impact of philosophical Platonism on European history has been overwhelmingly negative. Lilla amply confirms the view of Karl Popper that Plato, speaking in the voice of the fictional Socrates of the Republic, was the first and greatest enemy of the open society. - John Quiggin, reviewing Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. ... The anti-empirical taint ... survives to this day. ... What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. ... In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. ... The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)*

Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” - Plato (Cited in The Condition of Equality Today)

The word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and ... this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes ...
Generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)**

In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. — Angela Hobbs***

This is a continuation of some of the arguments in Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture. The proposition is that there is a theory, originating symbolically with Plato, that the intellectual has a privileged form of knowledge which l'homme moyen sensuel—the average nonintellectual man—cannot know. Plato taught that the reality experienced by the senses is an appearance generated by invisible Forms (ideas) existing in a sort of Platonic heaven:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

The philosopher (the intellectual) sees this underlying reality via a faculty—a form of "insight"—not available to the rest of us:

Alvin Lim: Plato’s argument for the inherent weakness of democracy in its potential to collapse into tyranny is strongly linked to his metaphysics, in particular his Theory of Forms. [4] In Plato’s ideal city the rulers are the Philosopher Rulers who have undergone the education sufficient for them to gain access to the Form of the Good, which allows them to know what justice is and hence to be able to rule the city justly (479e-484e). Since it is only the philosophers who have access to the Form of the Good, non-philosophers lack access to the Form of the Good and hence do not know what justice is. And since non-philosophers do not know what justice is, they cannot rule the city justly. Hence Cross and Woozley cite Adam’s comment that ‘the theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy’, [5] and this also explains what Finley describes as ‘Plato’s persistent objection to the role of shoemakers and shopkeepers in political decision making’. Zeitlin notes that in Laws 659a-b, Plato argues that:

Whether it is a matter of art, music or politics, it is only the ‘best men’ who are capable of true judgement. The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. Nothing must compel him to hand down a verdict that belies his own convictions. It is his duty to teach the multitude and not to learn from them. [6]

[Original link no longer active: web.singnet.com.sg/~chlim/plato.html]

Is there any truth in this? I repeat what I wrote in Analysis of Intellectual Subculture: "Extreme as this may sound, it resonates with my own experience. I attended two humanities classes of a major state university the day after the historic presidential election of 2008, certain that there would be at least some reaction to the opening of the presidency to minorities. After all, isn't diversity a mantra of the academic left? But it was business as usual."

As that long-suffering intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews, wrote:

["Skeptical Engagements"] By the mid-eighties, many academic humanists had already contracted the bad habit of labeling “right wing” all dissent not only from the overt politicizing of academic life but also from poststructuralist theory, including its component of esoteric Lacanian Freudianism. In the increasingly conformist atmosphere that has ruled the universities from then until now, scorn is routinely heaped on the ordinary liberalism to which I have long subscribed. And anyone who explicitly upholds rationality within the framework of a discipline will now be suspected of following a sinister hidden agenda,
... Those themes are the specific failings of Freudian psychoanalysis; the nature, appeal, and consequences of closed, self-validating doctrines; the resultant indispensability of an empirical (evidence-oriented) point of view; and the dubious effects of literary-critical methods that spurn that point of view. The several themes really come down to just one: the fear of facing the world, including its works of literature, without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand.
To “do theory” these days, as that expression is understood by department chairs who hope to load their ranks with a full panoply of “theorists,” is not to maintain a thesis against likely objections, but rather to strike attitudes that will identify one as a loyal follower of some figure—a Roland Barthes, a Jacques Derrida, a Michel Foucault, a Jacques Lacan, a Fredric Jameson—who has himself made unexamined claims about the nature of capitalism or patriarchy or Western civilization or the collective unconscious or the undecidability of knowledge. Such gurus are treasured, I suspect, less for their specific creeds than for the invigorating Nietzschean scorn they direct at intellectual prudence. The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds. (some of this material from www.cybereditions.com/cyextract.pdf)

Notes on starred material:
(*) Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron [because it was thought to represent a fifth essence (quintessence) that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies]. p. 151
A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. p. 152
Xenophon's opinion was: "What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities." [Cf. disdain for the banausic.] As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years. Without experiment, there is no way to choose among contending hypotheses, no way for science to advance. The anti-empirical taint of the Pythagoreans survives to this day. . . . What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. p. 153
In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. After a long mystical sleep in which the tools of scientific inquiry lay mouldering, the Ionian approach . . . was finally rediscovered. The Western world reawakened. Experiment and open inquiry became once more respectable. . . .
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)

(**) In philosophy [idealism] refers to efforts to account for all objects in nature and experience as representations of the mind and sometimes to assign to such representations a higher order of existence. It is opposed to materialism. Plato conceived a world in which eternal ideas constituted reality, of which the ordinary world of experience is a shadow.
And that was why you could figure it all out: if you could somehow attune yourself to that higher order of existence, you'd automatically know it all. And those who had come closer to achieving such enlightenment were therefore more wise than anyone else, and should be able to wield power over the others.
It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. ...
Of the three sides, [philosophical idealism] as a political force is the oldest. There's continuity going back to the pre-Christian Greeks, and generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)

(***) Plato's radical conceptions in the Republic of justice, social harmony, education, and freedom are enormously rich and have informed the thought of philosophers as diverse as Rousseau, Hegel, and J. S. Mill; his attitudes to property, the family, and the position of women have also proved highly influential. His ideal, however, has also come in for some fierce criticism. The convenient match claimed between the division of natural talents and the class divisions required by the state has been regarded as entirely without foundation. In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. Their methods of rule are also problematic: the analogy drawn between the Producers and the unreasoning appetites raises questions about whether the Producers can really be willingly persuaded or whether they have to be forced, and Plato's language is ambivalent on this point. In any case, the means of persuasion are themselves disturbing, involving both propaganda and extreme censorship of the arts. — Angela Hobbs