Once you've thought about everything excepting thinking (cognition) and about thinking itself (metacognition), there's nothing left to think about. Thinking about thinking is still thinking about thinking even if the thought that is thought about has as its object still another thought; meta-metacognition is merely the application of metacognition to a particular class of thoughts. If the veracity of the information about a suprasensory reality provided by metacognition in general is in doubt, than so must be that of meta-metacognition in particular; the latter can on no account be assumed to be exceptionally reliable and thus an appropriate mechanism of verification.* You have made here the same error you made in the Pence Rule thread, which there brought you, however briefly, into the sordid intellectual company of those who espouse ‘realpolitik’ thus defined:
A system of politics or principles based on practical rather than moral or ideological considerations.
This is plain nonsense. Practical considerations just
are moral or ideological considerations. For a principle or political belief of a group of people that regulates its behaviour to be based on practical considerations merely means that it has been adopted by that group on the grounds of the instrumentality of doing so in achieving its ends, fulfilling its desires, constitutional values, which collectively constitute the group’s (more or less completely conscious) system of morality, ideology. Practical principles are thus subordinate to moral principles, which are just these desires; the system of practicality is the procedural corollary of the substantive laws of behavior furnished by the moral system. Morality and practicality thus form an inseparable dyad of ‘why’ and ‘how’, of ends and courses of action; just as a value is impotent and irrelevant without a pursuant course of action, so is a course of action arbitrary and absurd without an end as its ground. Divorcing the dyad makes a mockery of both morality and practicality- and the vermin who infest civil society in alarming numbers do precisely this!
“That may be true morally, but you have to think practically”, or some such twaddle, is regurgitated with an sneer by every scoundrel who means to excuse the banal egoism of his own ends with a rhetorical sleight of hand whereby, like the petty illusion of the woman cut in half, morality and politics- one in the same body- are chimerically separated into a remote “idealistic” (for his resentful hatred for any graceful, benevolent spirit that reveals by contrast the vulgarity of his own character is betrayed by his refusal to recognize the indispensable role of the ideal in any conceivable conscious pursuit of something
better as the representation of perfection, the complete realization of one’s desire- which may never be reached but is yet striven towards and perchance approached- as a standard of success, for it is precisely his deficiency in ideals that he means to excuse and trivialize) fantasy on one hand and an absurd, lawless playground for rapacious, “pragmatic” Mammonites like him on the other (for there are no surroundings more congenial to a rat than a worthless trash heap upon which to glut himself), and when one lays bare the folly that he has had the audacity to pass off as political sagacity, protests of “that’s minutiae” and “you’re splitting hairs” can be heard as he cravenly terminates the discussion, vanishing behind a verbal smokescreen thick with the pungent odour of intellectual dishonesty, to see if he might have more success beguiling another audience with his cynical misdirection. And you have participated in this wretched stage magic by embracing the false dichotomy between practicality and morality in the aforementioned thread!
I don't believe in rights because they're a social construct just like responsibility. But responsibility is useful without the assumption of rights. Rights are useless without the assumption of responsibility. It just feels like conceptual creep to me. Tell someone who's starving they have a right to basic sustenance -> useless. Take responsibility for providing that sustenance -> useful.
As you then thought to ground the practicality of a course of action (feeding the person) in still more contingent practicality instead of its proper ground in morality (the desire to see the person fed), so you now seek to verify metacognition with still more- still fallible- metacognition. Though it now takes an epistemological rather than a moral form, the error is yet the same, and my objection now is the same as it was in the Pence thread: that the ruler stick cannot attest to its own length’s matching some important standard, but it is taken on faith that it does, for it is self-defeating to think that the instruments that we have been given to arrive at accurate conclusions about the world are manufactured by a deceitful 'evil demon'.
Edit: is this thread about memory? I have a great memory. Not photographic tho. But how do I know I can trust my memories...?
Oh, shut up and use induction already you miserable skeptic.
* Similarly, there is no such thing as metaphilosophy, properly speaking, because philosophy is merely the study of everything present for the subject- there is nothing left over for a ‘meta’-philosophy to study. As Michel de Montaigne famously stated in the preface to his
Essais, "je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre"; like metacognition, philosophy is never outside itself,
the self such that it can be an external arbiter, but always in and through the self; the philosopher and that which is philosophized about, the knower and the known, are one.
