Intellectual Honesty in the era of Social Media and memes.
Do people let their intellectual honesty slip for the quick high of a laugh based on falsities?
Believe it or not, intellectual honesty is quite a hot topic in Philosophy and has been for the last several hundred years, if not longer.
The modern German Philosopher Thomas Metzinger said:
“Intellectual honesty means simply not being willing to lie to oneself. It is closely related to old-fashioned values such as propriety, integrity and sincerity, to a certain form of “inner decency”. Perhaps one could say that it is a very conservative way of being truly subversive. But intellectual honesty might at the same time also be exactly what representatives of organized religions and theologians of any type simply cannot have, even if they would like to make claims to the contrary. Intellectual honesty means not pretending to know or even to be able to know the unknowable while still having an unconditional will to truth and knowledge, even where self-knowledge is involved and even where self-knowledge is not accompanied by pleasant feelings or is not in accordance with the received doctrine."
But the topic goes back so much farther.
Immanuel Kant:
In the Metaphysics of Morals (1797), he put this point concisely and clearly: “. . . man’s duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being . . . is . . . truthfulness.” At this point, Kant can also explain what intellectual dishonesty is, namely a kind of “inner lie.” For Kant, dishonesty is simply a lack of conscientiousness. Lacking conscientiousness in the ethical sense of inner action is nothing other than a form of unconsciousness, a lack of awareness—a further, interesting connection not only to the spiritual stance, but also to the history of the concept of “consciousness” in the occidental tradition.
Friedrich Nietzsche:
Intellectual honesty is the “conscience behind the conscience.” In 1883, he wrote in Zarathustra: “Where my honesty ceases I am blind and also want to be blind. But where I want to know, I also want to be honest, namely venomous, rigorous, vigorous, cruel and inexorable.” Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers to really write about intellectual honesty, about “conscientiousness of the mind” as an ethics of cognitive action more narrowly conceived. It is interesting to note that, once more, this involves a certain form of asceticism, of letting go. For Nietzsche, intellectual honesty is the “culmination and ‘last virtue’” of the Greco-Christian history of ideas, because it leads to the self-annihilation of the religious-moral interpretation of the will to truth.
William Kingdon Clifford summed it up nicely.
1) It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
2) At any time, at any place, and for every person it is wrong to ignore or carelessly reject the relevant evidence for one’s own beliefs.
= new reply since forum marked as read
