Everyone has fundamental assumptions. You could imagine someone who disagrees with yours calling them ājust vibesā or āpresuppositionsā, but that doesnāt yet establish that thereās anything wrong with your assumptions. To show an error, the critic would need to put forward some (disputable) positive claims of their own.
The level of agreement just shows that plenty of others share my starting assumptions.
If you take arguments to be ācircularā whenever a determined opponent could dispute them, I have news for you: there is no such thing as an argument that lacks this feature. (See my note on the limits of argumentation.)
I am trying to articulate (probably wrongly) the disconnect I perceive here. I think āvibesā might sound condescending, but ultimately, you seem to agree with assumptions (like math axioms) not being amenable to disputation. Like, technically, in philosophical practice, one can try to show, I imagine, that given assumption x some contradiction (or at least, something very generally perceived as wrong and undesirable) follows.
I do share the feeling expressed by Charlie Guthmann here that a lot of starting arguments for moral realists are just of the type āx is obvious/āself-evident/āfeels good to be/āfeels worth believingā, and when stated in that way, they feel equally obviously false to those who donāt share those intuitions, and as magical thinking (āIf you really want something, the universe conspires to make it come aboutā Paulo Coelho style). I feel more productive engaging strategies should just avoid altogether any claims of the mentioned sort, and perhaps start with stating what might follow from realist assumptions that might be convincing/āpersuasive to the other side, and vice versa.
Everyone has fundamental assumptions. You could imagine someone who disagrees with yours calling them ājust vibesā or āpresuppositionsā, but that doesnāt yet establish that thereās anything wrong with your assumptions. To show an error, the critic would need to put forward some (disputable) positive claims of their own.
The level of agreement just shows that plenty of others share my starting assumptions.
If you take arguments to be ācircularā whenever a determined opponent could dispute them, I have news for you: there is no such thing as an argument that lacks this feature. (See my note on the limits of argumentation.)
I am trying to articulate (probably wrongly) the disconnect I perceive here. I think āvibesā might sound condescending, but ultimately, you seem to agree with assumptions (like math axioms) not being amenable to disputation. Like, technically, in philosophical practice, one can try to show, I imagine, that given assumption x some contradiction (or at least, something very generally perceived as wrong and undesirable) follows.
I do share the feeling expressed by Charlie Guthmann here that a lot of starting arguments for moral realists are just of the type āx is obvious/āself-evident/āfeels good to be/āfeels worth believingā, and when stated in that way, they feel equally obviously false to those who donāt share those intuitions, and as magical thinking (āIf you really want something, the universe conspires to make it come aboutā Paulo Coelho style). I feel more productive engaging strategies should just avoid altogether any claims of the mentioned sort, and perhaps start with stating what might follow from realist assumptions that might be convincing/āpersuasive to the other side, and vice versa.