The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
501. Reality and the Philosophical Framing of the Truth | Dr. Stephen Hicks
Mon, 25 Nov 2024
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with philosopher, professor, and lecturer Dr. Stephen Hicks. They discuss their collaboration through the Peterson Academy, the case for philosophy on the practical level,the evolution of human thought across intellectual movements and waves, the notion that we see reality through a story, and the danger of getting the story wrong. Stephen Hicks’ writings have been translated into twenty languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, German, Korean, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Swedish, Hindi, Russian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, French, Hebrew, Estonian, Urdu, Turkish, and Arabic. He has published in academic journals such as “Business Ethics Quarterly,” “Teaching Philosophy,” and “Review of Metaphysics,” as well as other publications such as “The Wall Street Journal” and “Cato Unbound.” In 2010, he won his university’s Excellence in Teaching Award. He was Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois; has been Visiting Professor of Business Ethics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.; Visiting Professor at Jagiellonian University, Poland; Visiting Fellow at the Social Philosophy & Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio; Visiting Fellow at Harris Manchester College at Oxford University in England; Senior Fellow at The Objectivist Center in New York; and Visiting Professor at the University of Kasimir the Great, Poland. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Guelph, Canada, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from Indiana University, Bloomington, USA. This episode was filmed on November 15th, 2024 | Links | For Stephen Hicks: On Peterson Academy https://petersonacademy.com/ On X https://x.com/SRCHicks?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Website https://www.stephenhicks.org/
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
Today I had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Stephen Hicks, who's a philosopher with a stellar academic career, very good author. And we talked about, well, we talked about his contributions to Peterson Academy first. He's taught five courses at this new online university that some of you may be aware of, and the rest of you should be, as far as I'm concerned.
He's taught five courses there, and we... detailed out the structure of the courses. And more importantly and more broadly, I would say, describe the rationale for studying philosophy because he's a professional philosopher as an academic. And so we discussed, well, the importance of a philosophical education.
We discussed the nature of the philosophical endeavor over the last three or four hundred years as it shifted from modernism to post-modernism to whatever is dawning in this new age that's emerging. And... That constituted the bulk of our conversation. And so if you're interested in that, and you should be, and if you're not, you should ask yourself, why then? Join us.
Chapter 2: Why is philosophy important in modern education?
If the answer is no, it's because you're unconsciously under the sway of some skeptical philosopher, and maybe you shouldn't be. So join us anyways for that discussion. So, Dr. Hicks, it's good to see you again.
A pleasure.
Yeah, thank you for coming into Scottsdale today.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, much appreciated. So, I thought we would start by talking practically a bit about... You've lectured. You've done two lectures for Peterson Academy? I've done five.
Two are out.
Okay, two are out. You've done five. Excellent. Okay, so... Run through that a bit. Tell people what you're teaching and what the experience was like and how you understand the mission of this new enterprise. Why you got involved, all of that, if you would.
Right. Well, I'm a philosopher by training. So my intellectual interest is in philosophy. what the next generation of good philosophy teaching is going to look like. We've got technological revolutions that we are engaged in, and education has been very traditional and backward-minded for many centuries.
So, in one sense, we are living in an exciting time for what can be done with the new technologies, and obviously, Peterson Academy is highly entrepreneurial, So I've done many years of in-class teaching, many years of lecturing. I had at my university a center for ethics and entrepreneurship where we did a lot of experimenting with new technologies as things came on, asking what can be done.
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Chapter 3: How have philosophical ideas shaped modern society?
But from their more skeptical perspective, by the time we get into the 20th century, their verdict is philosophy has become impotent and self-realizes that it can't, in fact, answer any of those questions, so it should, in effect, disintegrate. So I'm concerned to lay out the pre-postmodern philosophers who are setting the stage for all of this.
Here I would name people like Bertrand Russell, who had a strongly skeptical phase, John Dewey and some of the pragmatists to some extent, Martin Heidegger. and various others culminating then in thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, who take it.
But also at the same time, since I don't agree with any of them, but I do give them a fair shot, and we're trying to get inside their framework and see where they are coming from, and why these arguments are so powerful, and that we have to take them seriously.
Nonetheless, there have been many, as I think of them, philosophers who think the earlier traditions, sometimes the pre-modern, more scholastic or religious traditions, still have some bite and can be repackaged for this post-modern era.
Some who think the modern... I've probably fallen into that camp as of late.
Well, I think to some extent, yes. So, you would be an example of that. Others who think the Enlightenment project has been a great success, Even though it had some philosophical errors, those can be tweaked as an ongoing scientific project. And so I'm interested in also thinkers like Karl Popper and Ayn Rand and Philippa Foot, who are not so skeptical.
In fact, they are carrying on the modern Enlightenment tradition.
Right, right, right.
And the idea at the end of that course is that we have a sense of what the philosophical and philosophically informed intellectual landscape looks like in our time. Bringing it right up to current times and characterizing it as, in effect, a three-way debate between the moderns, the pre-moderns, and the post-moderns and post-moderns.
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Chapter 4: What are the key differences between modern and postmodern philosophy?
But even the more active-minded people, I think, as you are pointed out, even if you are, to a large extent, independently coming up with ideas, it nonetheless is illuminating many cases to realize that there has been a smart person who thought of that before you, in many cases in a more sophisticated form and integrated that with other ideas.
So sometimes you can find a thinker who has gone down the roads that you are going down. And most of us don't have time to be active intellectuals. We have our full lives. So anything that we can learn from the philosophers who've thought through these issues can accelerate our process down that road.
And then, of course, the other thing is that to the extent that you don't think about these things, what you are saying, I think, is exactly right. In many cases, we are unconsciously guided in certain directions. Sometimes I think of an analogy to infrastructure, so all of the roads and traffic lights and lighting systems and so forth.
And we grow up with them and, you know, we're like the fish in the water. We just take it for granted that we're surrounded by these things. And we have automated operating inside a certain kind of infrastructure system. But at the same time, it is illuminating to step back and think that somebody thought through every aspect of that infrastructure system.
Mm-hmm.
And in many cases, I'm being directed perhaps in ways that are not healthy. And how can we make that infrastructure system better? That's going to take people who are aware that in many cases they are being guided by that infrastructure.
So that's a good thing to focus in on, I think, too, at the moment. And this is where we could have a discussion about postmodernism, and modernism, and maybe what comes next. So let me lay out a couple of propositions for you, and tell me what you think about this. This is maybe the nexus of what I was hoping to discuss with you.
So I'll give the postmodernist devils their due to begin with, and you can tell me what your opinion is about that. So I think that we are on the cusp of a philosophical and maybe a theological revolution. And I think it's in part because the postmodernists identified some of the flaws in Enlightenment thinking. And so the postmodernists, there's a...
The fundamental postmodernist insistence, as far as I can discern, is that we inevitably, we by necessity, see the world through a story. And so I've been trying to figure out what that means. And the large language model, emergence of the large language models have helped out with that. So imagine that. I want you to correct me if I get any of this wrong.
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Chapter 5: How do stories influence our perception of reality?
representationalist model or they start going internal and then they start talking about motivations and theory ladens and other beliefs that you have and once you make that divide there is no way to get out subject out of the subject and back to reality on the other hand if you try to react to that and say the subject has can have nothing to do with it because we really think there is such a thing as knowledge
then you try as desperately as you can to erase the subject right to pretend the subject doesn't exist to turn the subject into some sort of super shiny mirror that just reflects things or some sort of diaphanous reincorporation of exactly what's out there happens inside the subject but that also is an impossible model so what i want to say is the empiricist commitment and historically the empiricists have struggled to work with uh work this out this is this is the ongoing project
In the early modern era, I think they had very weak accounts of sense perception, and that was part of the big problem. And I think, as you rightly pointed out, postmodernism centuries later is the end result of teasing out the sometimes very subtle weaknesses in those very early models.
What I would just say is the first project for empiricists is to argue that there is a residual base level in contact that can serve as the basis for knowledge and the test for everything else no matter how sophisticated it starts. But that, as an epistemological claim, has to work with a certain understanding of philosophy of mind. You can't do
the epistemology entirely in abstraction from some sort of neuroscience, some sort of understanding of psychology, the relation of the mind to the body, and both of them to reality. And I think the important point here is to see consciousness as a relational phenomenon. And that's a philosophy of mind claim. Let me just say, it's not a shiny mirror that simply reflects reality.
It's not a pre-existing entity that has its own nature and just kind of makes up whatever it wants for itself. It's a response mechanism. And all of these other things have to come out of that. Let me just say one more thing. I think we talk a lot about epistemology and epistemological concerns really have dominated modern philosophy, modern psychology, the modern scientific project.
And I think that's fine to... You should define that for people, epistemology. The theory of knowledge. So we try to figure out... So the ology part is to give an account of something or an explanation of. In this case, it's the Greek word episteme, right, for knowledge. When do I really know something? We have all kinds of beliefs kicking around.
But the difference between imagination and fantasy and perception and... Falsehood. That's right. And just having been conditioned to do certain things. So how do I really know that I know something? And when should I say that I don't really know something? And developing self-consciously what the standards are for good knowledge.
And this involves some reflection on sense perception, as we're starting to talk about now, a good understanding of language and grammar, logic. And then when we start talking about stories, and we say stories do, in some sense, inform us, and we can really learn about the world through story. What's the place of narrative in a proper epistemological framework?
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Chapter 6: What is the relationship between emotions and reasoning?
I think the people that we've brought together on Peterson Academy too are at the forefront of that attempt to integrate. And so that's one of our, you might say, one of our educational themes as we move forward is to continue that investigation. John Vervaeke, I would say, is somebody who's on the forefront of that on the psychological and neuroscience side.
So let's go back to your demonstration of primary sensory input, right? Just hitting the table. So I'll outline a neuroscience approach to that. So, you might think that you perceive, and then you evaluate, and then you think, and then you act, and that's like the causal chain.
None of that's exactly correct because even when you're responding to a primary stimulus like that, so to speak, there's a hierarchy of neurological responses that are operating more or less simultaneously. Now, I'd say more or less because you do have reflexive action.
I think the simplest way to understand this is to assume that what you're detecting as a consequence of the slap that you delivered to the table is a patterned waveform.
Let me just interrupt. Are you talking about my experience of that or your experience of it? Because I came in with a pre-intention in that case. And yours was a different passive surprise response. Let's get to that. Exactly.
at one level of analysis it's the state the same stimulus let's say insofar as it's an isolatable sound that you could record and duplicate with a with a phone recorder or something like that but then as you said the fact that you come to that experience with different expectations colors it and so there is a way to think about that
I think the best way to start to understand it is to think about the pattern. So there's a waveform pattern that propagates in the air, which is the delivery system, obviously, for the stimulus. And then there's an auditory pattern. Now,
When your nervous system receives that pattern, it doesn't go to one point, place, and then another place, and then another place, and then another place in a linear progression. There's some of that, but what happens is that the pattern is... assessed simultaneously by multiple different levels of the nervous system, right? So the most primary level would be spinal.
And there are very few connections between the auditory system and the spinal response system. And so, for example, if I was on edge or uncertain about you or about this circumstance, and you hit the table in that manner unexpectedly, one probable outcome is a startle reflex. And a startle reflex is a variant of a predator response. It's of a response to predation. And it's basically...
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Chapter 7: How does neuroscience relate to our understanding of philosophy?
So, in many cases, they had very crude understandings of what memory would be, what reflex would be, what emotions would be, perception, right, and so forth.
And so, naturally, then it makes sense that they're trying to insist that we actually are in contact with reality at a basic level, but then very quickly they are speculating about what's going on in all of these other areas, and their theories are faulty, and it's the weaknesses of those theories that then lead people to start to say, well, empiricism is a failed project, instead of seeing it as an ongoing project.
The other thing I would say, or actually there's two other things. One is, as you described the process, you say out there, there's the slap, there are sound waves. We are making realist claims. There really was a slap. There really are structured energy patterns.
And we really do have in our ears or in our hands receptors that are in place that respond to some energy patterns and don't respond to other energy patterns. And all of that, we are making reality claims. And we're saying that then there are causal processes that go on inside the physiological system of the human being. Some of them, as you say, operate in parallel.
They have feedback loops and so forth. I think I'm a very minimal empiricist on this, is to say that empiricism only insists that There really is a reality. Well, there is a reality, and it has these patterns that we're not making up those patterns, and we're not imposing those patterns on the reality.
Instead, what we call our sensory receptors is an array of cells that if there are certain structures in reality, they will respond. but they're not making up those structures in reality. So my nose, for example, has no... Or at least sometimes they're not making them up. Well, okay, but the sometimes comes later. Yeah. Okay, and we can come to that.
So my nose, for example, has all kinds of chemical structures out there. It doesn't have a pre-existing theory that out there in reality there are dead rotting things.
right it's just that if i happen to encounter dead rotting things then certain chemicals will be laughing and then my my nose will respond and things will happen in a certain way that's important whether you say what our noses are doing is kind of imposing a structure on an unstructured reality. And that takes you down the skeptical road versus... Yeah, the nose is a particularly good example.
Right, versus saying that the structures are there and what we have are just latent reception structures that if those structures happen to be present will be responsive. And that thing is all of the... the empiricists are saying. Now, all of the other stuff where we say, okay, the background set, I came to the slab with a background set, you came with a different background set.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of philosophical thought on human behavior?
the capacity for sustainable improvement. So you could think about this. Think about this in the context, let's say, of a marital relationship, right? There's a very large number of ways that your marriage can go wrong, like an indefinite number of ways that your marriage can go wrong. But then there's a constrained number of ways that it will go right. And that's because it's a difficult target.
Imagine that the specifications are something like, for your marriage to be successful, The micro routines and the macro routines have to be such that you're voluntarily okay with them and your wife is voluntarily okay with them. And they bond you more tightly together across time. And this would be the optimal situation. As you lay them out together, they improve.
Okay, and so you could imagine that as the basis for an optimized contractual relationship of any form. But then you could also imagine that the number of variants of the way that you can treat each other for all of those conditions to be met would be low. There's a very small number of voluntary playable games that are iterable across large spans of time that improve as you play them.
So then you'd get an evolutionary pressure as well on the domains of possible philosophy, right? That they'd fill up something like a space. And that seems to me to be reflective. It's weird because that's also reflective of an empirical reality, but it's not... It's not the reality that's associated with basic sense data.
It's more the fact that there is a finite number of complex games that are voluntary playable and that improve. And that's also a fact, right? I mean, and that would be, I think that's partly why there are patterns of ethics that tend to emerge in many different cultures, even independently, right? And that also makes a mockery in some ways of a really radical relativism.
It's not that the value space, the philosophical space isn't relativistic because there's a finite number of interpretive frameworks that actually have anything approximating productive staying power. And that is reflective of something like the structure of reality. It's more sophisticated reflection than the basic sense data. And so, see, I'm saying this because I'm trying to
mediate between the postmodern claim that we see the world through a narrative, which I think that's true. I think all the neuroscience data points in that direction. And then you might say, well, any old story goes then. It's like, no, just because we see the world through a story doesn't mean that the stories themselves aren't constrained by empirical reality in its most sophisticated sense.
And it also doesn't mean that the stories themselves even though their stories fail to correspond to reality.
That's extraordinarily rich, everything that you're laying out there. Let me just start with one thread to pull out. I do not like the language that says we see reality through a narrative. I understand the attraction of it.
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