Amia Srinivasan's virulent wokeness

Gerhard Gentzen- described as 'Logic's lost genius'- made major contributions to proof theory and what is now called 'inferential role semantics' which is important when the meaning of a word changes as we use it to reason with. In this context, Gentzen's choosing to become a Nazi- he starved to death in a Soviet POW camp- when he could have gone to Princeton to work with Weyl- seems rather sinister. Perhaps having a clear cut denotation of 'good' and 'bad' is a superior alternative to being able to represent 'Hegelian' reasoning. 

Obviously, if Hitler hadn't been crazy enough to declare war on both the Soviets and the Americans, he might have remained in power as long as Franco did. In that case, Gentzen would be considered a smart fellow who knew which side his bread was buttered on.

Still, Gentzen's notion of 'sequents' and the 'cut elimination theorem' are very useful. Arguably, casting individual processes of reasoning as a sequence of conditional tautologies rather than expecting everyone to subscribe to the same set of axioms and to accept any valid deduction from those axioms, would rid epistemology of 'Gettier problems' and absurd assertions about 'truth tracking' or the pyrrhic victories of Pyrrhonians in this context. 

Sadly there isn't some nice ready made answer we can quickly Google to the question of how Gentzen's methods could repair moral philosophy's parlous state.

It appears, on an admittedly superficial appraisal, that 'mainline' Philosophy (except maybe in Canada), from around the Seventies onwards seems to have lost touch with developments in logic. Dummett & Prawitz did attempt to use Gentzen to arrive at an anti-realist or verificationist account of meaning. This seemed worth pursuing because a realist theory relies too heavily on the existence of constraints which we have no reason to believe are permanent features of experience.

I wonder whether the rapidity of technological change we have all experienced since the dawning of the internet age has rendered this sort of project moot. Maths is surging ahead while Philosophy is doomed to degenerate into a branch of Grievance Studies. 

As a case in point, consider the following-

 3.1 RACIST DINNER TABLE and CLAIRVOYANT41 Clairvoyant Norman isn’t justified, according to internalists, because there is nothing introspectively available to him that could plausibly serve as his grounds for believing the president is in New York.

Why couldn't he know, by clairvoyance, when he was being clairvoyant? Either the word 'clairvoyant' is meaningless or- because it refers to knowledge- it has its own epistemology which might be as sophisticated as proof-theory? How on earth could we, mere mortals, say anything about what is 'introspectively available' to a being with a super-natural property?

He does not have anything like a quasiperceptual vision of the president’s being in New York; at best he has, BonJour says, a ‘hunch’.

He could have a vision of himself having a true vision in this respect. It may also give him a clue that his Clairvoyance is a gift of Cthulhu who no longer seeks to devour the world because it has set up a b&b in upstate New York with its partner- a Yoga instructor. 

But in Nour’s case, internalists might protest, there is something that serves as her introspectively available grounds: for Nour experiences her host being racist.

And a young Arab woman must always be believed in such matters if an older, richer, WASP man is being accused. That's Wokeness 101.

Why is it not this experience that, for the internalist, justifies her belief? It is true that Nour experiences her host: she sees him, hears him, speaks with him. But does she experience her host being racist? As I have described the case, Nour does not have a conscious experience as of her host being racist: she enjoys no ‘my-host-is-racist’ phenomenology. Nevertheless, the internalist might press on, does Nour not experience the subtle behaviours – the verbal and physical cues – on which her subconscious racism-detecting mechanism picks up? Does she not thus have evidence that her host is racist, albeit evidence that she subconsciously rather than consciously processes? Certainly, there is a version of RACIST DINNER TABLE in which this is precisely what happens. But in the version of the case that I have described, Nour does not have conscious experience of those features of the host’s behaviour that trigger her subconscious racism-detecting mechanism.

But, because she is young and Arab she gets to class any WASP guy as racist in the same way that Hitler-lovers could class any mathematics or physics as Jewish and therefore fraudulent. 

It is not that she hears a certain inflection in the host’s voice, and sees certain fleeting micro-expressions, which in turn are processed by her subconscious, ultimately delivering the (consciously available) verdict that her host is racist. Rather, the detection of her host’s subtle behaviours – the ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ – is itself subconscious, or what psychologists call ‘preattentive’. Preattentive or subconscious processing of perceptual information, especially information related to environment threats and emotions, is a broadly recognised phenomenon, though not an uncontroversial one. Whether one could have the sort of subconscious processing of perceptual information that I ascribe to Nour’s is of course a further issue, one that I cannot possibly resolve. But even if it turns out that it is not possible for humans to subconsciously process subtle cues of racism, this just puts Nour in the same boat as Norman, who enjoys a power that no human actually has. Let me offer one further brief reply to this internalist line of defence. Suppose it really is a conscious experience – of vocal hesitations, flickerings of the eyes, etc. – that is then subconsciously processed by Nour, which in turn results in her belief that her host is racist. Now imagine Nour*, who has an internally identical experience to Nour, but whose host is just a bit socially awkward, and not at all racist. Is Nour*’s belief that her host is racist justified? My intuition here, for what it is worth, is that she is not. If this is right, then it means that even in this version of the case – where Nour does have some conscious experiences that could potentially serve as the grounds for belief – it is not these conscious experiences, but something else, that renders Nour’s belief justified. The externalist offers us an easy answer as to what that something else might be: namely, Nour’s reliable connection to the truth.

Amia invented Nour. She is saying Nour did not have any reason whatsoever to decide a particular guy was racist. Still, she is Arab. She was invented for the purpose of denouncing a WASP as a racist whether or not he was any such thing. This follows from the fundamental theorem of Wokeness. Since woke nutters don't like thinking- it makes their little brains hurt- Wokeness should espouse 'externalism' coz that shit is as easy as pie. Tomorrow our imaginary Arab can get rid of a lot of Maths and Logic and Literature on the basis that it is Jewish and therefore fraudulent. Boycott Israel now! 

3.2 CLASSIST COLLEGE and DOGMATIST Dogmatist Mary truly believes – based on her reliable colour perception, which she has reason to believe is unreliable – that the sculpture is red. Similarly, Charles truly believes – based on his reliable judgment, which he has reason to believe is unreliable – that the college is classist.

The problem here is that Oxford and Cambridge and Eton and so forth have always been advertised and acknowledged as promoting one to a superior class status. Attending such places is supposed to make you more of a 'gentleman'. Mary dogmatically believes she saw a sculpture because she was in an Art Gallery and that is perfectly reasonable. Charles can have a similar dogmatic belief. But Mary would be considered mad if she complained that she was forced to see a sculpture in a place specifically set up for that purpose and the same could be said of  Charles complaining that his elite Oxford College is posher than the Queen's tits.  

The internalist might protest that the cases are nonetheless disanalogous. For while Mary believes a proposition that is only contingently true (the sculpture is red), Charles believes a proposition that is true by necessity. For the college – holding fixed the non-normative facts about it – is classist in all metaphysically possible worlds.

Nonsense! That College could bring in lots of kids from Council Estates who spend their time knifing the dons and dealing drugs.  

Why might this difference matter? Because one might think that beliefs in necessary truths are immune from defeat: that they cannot lose their justification through the acquisition of misleading first-order evidence (to the effect they are false) or through the acquisition of misleading higher-order evidence (to the effect that they are based on unreliable, unsafe or otherwise faulty mechanisms).

Newcombe problems are examples of cases where it is rational to disbelieve necessary truths. 

Nagel, for examples, argues that beliefs in very simple logical and mathematical truths cannot be defeated by either first-order or higher-order evidence, because it is inconceivable that they are false (1996, 62ff).

Sadly, it is equally inconceivable that they are essentially meaningful. 

Because one cannot meaningfully entertain, Nagel says, the sceptical possibility that one’s judgment is false or based on an unreliable mechanism, defeat of such beliefs is impossible.

But of what is meaningless it is meaningless to speak of defeat.  

But Nagel concedes that this isn’t the case with all necessary truths; in particular, he thinks that most ethical truths are such that we can conceive the possibility that our judgment about them is unreliable.

Thus, if part of being ethical is making proper judgments, ethics judges judgment to be unreliable. 

Presumably, that the college is classist is one  such proposition: it does not enjoy the self-evidentiary quality of simple mathematical and logical propositions. So Nagel’s account of why certain beliefs in necessary truths enjoy immunity from defeat will not serve the internalist here. Nor will Plantinga’s insistence that what he calls ‘properly basic’ beliefs are immune from higher-order defeat, since Plantinga includes both perceptual beliefs and ethical beliefs in this category. 48 Of course, one can simply insist that beliefs in all necessary truths – or just all necessary normative truths – are immune from defeat.49 This would be to draw a sharp disanalogy between CLASSIST COLLEGE and DOGMATIST, one that an internalist could leverage to explain why it is that, consistent with her internalism, Mary’s belief loses its justification but Charles’ belief remains justified. But absent a convincing explanation as to why Charles’ belief is so immune, this response is suspiciously ad hoc.

Charles has an immunity coz he is, by stipulation, 'working class'. Thus he must, by Wokeness 101, make common cause with the young Arab woman to boycott Israel and occupy Wall Street and say 'boo to neo-liberalism'. 

Still, Charles may be wrong about his College being 'classist'. All the Old Etonians there may have been scholarship students from poor families. They failed to acquire the necessary arts and graces (i.e. whom to suck off or suck up to) and thus were passed over by the Merchant Banks and Magic Circle Law firms which is why they were stuck in an academic rut. This fact is known to all true Aristos but Charles is still feeling his way in a novel milieu. 

JaneBIV has an internal duplicate who knows that she has hands: normally embodied Jane. But Radha, it seems, does not have an internal duplicate who knows that she deserves to be beaten. 

Yes she does- karma believing Radha. In her last life she beat the shit out of hubby who is now doing the same to her so that her bad karma gets cancelled. Next stop- Moksha!

Why might this disanalogy matter? It matters, the internalist might argue, because it suggests that – contrary to what I have claimed – Radha’s evidence does not in fact give internalistic support to her belief that she deserves to be beaten. If Radha’s evidence is not metaphysically compatible with a possible world in which she deserves to be beaten, how can it be that it supports her being in such a world? If this is right, the internalist has a ready explanation for why Radha is not justified: her belief is not (unlike with JaneBIV) supported by her evidence. 

Amia invented Radha. Sadly Amia knows shit about Hinduism. So she fucked up.

Let us grant for the sake of argument that there is no metaphysically possible world in which Radha, fixing her mental states, deserves to be beaten.

For the sake of what sort of argument? A 'woke' one of startling stupidity. Radha may aspire to the pleasures of Masochism or else feel that adverse circumstances are propelling her on a spiritual path or many other things.

 Why should this imply that Radha’s evidence cannot give internalistic support for the belief that she deserves to be beaten?

It does not imply any such thing. A battered woman might say 'I deserve this punishment for lacking the courage to stab this stupid fucker or chop off his goolies'. 

 Imagine an early modern scientist before the discovery of the chemical composition of water. Despite his assiduous laboratory procedures, a sample of his water gets accidentally contaminated with xyz; as a result, tests on this sample issue in results incompatible with the sample being (pure) H2O. Does the scientist thereby receive misleading evidence that water is not H2O? Surely the answer is yes.

No. The scientist receives evidence that there is something wrong with his experimental procedure. This is because experiments are repeatable. 

 But there is no metaphysically possible world in which water is not H2O.

We don't know that. Everything with a Kripkean rigid designation as water might become something else because of a cosmological event. A new type of particle may pervade the solar system and bind with some things but not others.

 So it would follow, from the principle that evidence cannot internalistically justify a metaphysically impossible proposition, that the scientist cannot get evidence that water is not H2O. Something has gone awry. Our mistake was to think that relations of evidential support are constrained by metaphysical possibility. 

'Metaphysical possibility' is meaningless. You may as well speak of the Nicaraguan horcrux of the neighbor's cat.

Bodies of evidence can be evidentially compatible with (and evidentially supportive of) propositions with which they are not metaphysically compatible. 

Nonsense! There would always be some metaphysics which makes them not just compatible but winners on the Dating Game who went on to star in their own reality show featuring their adorable tots.

What matters for evidential compatibility is not metaphysical possibility but conceivability. It is conceivable that water is not H2O, even though water is necessarily H2O; thus it is possible to get misleading evidence that water is not H2O.

No. It is only possible to get evidence that you fucked up your lab work.

 Likewise, it is conceivable that Radha deserves to be beaten

Not to me. She may deserve to go to jail. But, by Law, nothing she can do deserves corporal punishment of any sort. 

 – indeed, Radha is just one of many who believes that disobedient wives deserve to be beaten – so it is possible for Radha to get misleading evidence to the effect that she deserves to be beaten. 

Like what? Hubby saying so? The problem here is that Hinduism says that hubby can only be an 'amsa' of the Lord. A beating husband is an inferior 'amsa'. She should separate from him to get closer to be the higher 'amsa'. 

This is in spite of the fact that Radha has no metaphysically possible internal duplicate who knows she deserves to be beaten.

Radha may choose not to be a 'pativrata' and just consider her suffering here as a paying of a karmic debt- equivalent to the practice of harsh austerities. 

 An alternative way for the internalist to press a disanalogy between Radha and the brain-in-a-in vat is to insist that Radha in fact is in a position to know that she doesn’t deserve to be beaten.

Because she could kill the fucker and take her chances with the Law Courts. 

 For – a certain sort of internalist might say – all (minimally competent) humans are capable of knowing certain moral truths (e.g. that wife-beating is wrong) through a priori moral reflection. If Radha believes she deserves to be beaten, this just goes to show that she has not adequately reflected on the question.

Radha does not exist. Amia invented her but did so in a scenes a faire manner which displayed her own ignorance, bigotry, and deracination.

 In this way Radha is importantly unlike the brain-in-a-vat, for whom no amount of assiduous reflection will reveal the truth that she doesn’t have hands.

Nonsense. Vatted brains will soon gravitate to a different phenomenology better adapted to their changed fitness landscape.

 Such an internalist could agree with the externalist that Radha’s belief that  she deserved to be beaten is unjustified, but for reasons quite different from those given by the externalist. DOMESTIC VIOLENCE would then be no threat to internalism. I will call this the ‘strong rationalist’ response. A strong rationalist does not merely insist that some moral truths are a priori knowable. A strong rationalist insists that certain moral truths are a priori knowable to every minimally competent agent. (Just because some very complex mathematical truth is a priori knowable doesn’t mean that it’s knowable for every competent agent.) Is such a view plausible? To be a strong rationalist is to effectively deny the possibility of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.  For I stipulated that Radha thoroughly reflects on her situation and the moral issues at stake, and nonetheless – precisely because she has so thoroughly internalised the patriarchal ideology that surrounds her – is unable to see that she does not deserve to be beaten. The strong rationalist simply denies this possibility: he thinks that the truth that one does not deserve to be beaten by one’s husband is always yielded, to anyone, by proper a priori reflection, regardless of her epistemic situation.

Patriarchy is not committed to the notion that women should be beaten. It may be that Amia's Daddy beat her every day and then tried to sell her to a guy who'd beat her every day. But we do not consider Daddies who do this to be patriarchs. Amia is herself descended from Vedic Rishis who were patriarchs. Where is there any evidence of their beating their wives or daughters? What about Abraham in the Bible? Was he constantly beating his wives or daughters? How about the Cohens or Sayyads- i.e. descendants of the Prophets Aaron and Muhammad respectively? Are they notorious wife-beaters? There may be one or two such cases- perhaps because of addiction or mental illness- but the fact is such families are known for their affectionate and gentle treatment of spouses. That is why they are highly desirable grooms. 

I for one find strong rationalism implausible.

Because you are irrational. 

It seems to me plainly possible for there to be someone like Radha,

a Tamil or Malyallee Hindu woman (because Krishnan is a name only found in those communities) who holds beliefs which have no basis in Tamil religion or culture. Of course, it is possible that Krishnan is a Communist, like the wife-beating Comrade Meena Kandasamy has written about. But in that case the contemned ideology is Marxism not Patriarchy.

 who grasps the relevant concepts, reflects as thoroughly as she can, and still comes to the false belief that she deserves to be beaten. Indeed a case like DOMESTIC VIOLENCE seems to me quite pedestrian, and no less conceivable than, say, BRAIN-IN-A-VAT. (I don’t think there are any real-world brains-in-vats, but I do think there are quite a few real-world Radhas.) Insisting on the impossibility of DOMESTIC VIOLENCE strikes me, then, as a large bullet for the internalist to bite. That said, for the internalist willing to do so, the threat represented by DOMESTIC VIOLENCE can be neutralised. Just how many internalists will find this an attractive option remains an open question.

Amia is trying to show that 'Wokeness' requires a Woke epistemic hierarchy where a College educated Arab woman or working class man is always right but a poor rural woman is always wrong coz getting 'woke' involves spending a lot of money going to College. 

She gives the following example which 'grates' on her Leftist political sensibilities

ABORTION: Thomas is a young man who has grown up in a community gripped by bad leftist ideology. All his life he has been surrounded by prochoice peers and adults, and exposed only to pro-choice arguments. But Thomas cannot shake the conviction that abortion is, despite what everyone says, wrong. His elders and peers tell him that this must be a manifestation of his deep-seated hatred of women. But in fact it’s the result of his genuine sensitivity to the moral truth, namely the truth that abortion really is categorically wrong. Despite all the misleading evidence from his peers and elders, Thomas cleaves to his belief that abortion is wrong. 

Is Thomas’ belief that abortion is wrong justified? 

No. They guy can't get preggers. He can't choose to have an abortion. He is welcome to condemn any person who negligently or otherwise causes a woman to miscarry. He is not welcome to encroach on a sphere were women should have a Hohfeldian immunity. 

We can imagine Thomas raping a girl- who may not be able to report the crime- and getting her pregnant and then using the law so as to stop her aborting it and then claiming custody of the kid on the grounds that she is a horrible person who tried to get an abortion and then getting lots of money from her for child support. 

Of course if Thomas spends his life financially supporting women who, for economic reasons, may have been forced to abort a dearly longed for child, then his justification for his actions- viz. he thinks abortion for economic reasons abhorrent, more particularly in a wealthy country- is perfectly acceptable. 

I think the answer is surely yes. If abortion really were wrong, and it really were just a matter of bad ideology that made leftists think otherwise,

Ceaucescu was a Communist. He banned abortion and contraception in Romania with horrific consequences. 

 then an individual who was genuinely sensitive to the badness of abortion, and formed a belief in its badness on such a basis, would – analogously with Charles in CLASSIST COLLEGE – be justified.

This is not the case. The goodness or badness of a belief can't be determined without reference to its good or bad effects on others.

 And yet the confound error theory would predict that my intuitions wouldn’t go this way, because saying that a young man would be justified in his belief that abortion is wrong grates against my political sensibilities. (It does grate. But I feel the intuition powerfully nonetheless.) ABORTION suggests that what is doing the work in the bad ideology cases isn’t leftist political sympathies – after all, there is nothing in the notion of bad ideology that is inherently leftist

But the word 'leftist' is either ideological or it is nothing. Bad leftist ideology- like Amia's- harms those the Left claim to help.

 – but the politically-neutral fact that these cases involve subjects forming beliefs under bad ideological conditions.

There is no evidence that any 'ideological conditions' were involved in 'belief formation' in either case. 

 A different way of pressing the worry about moral/political confounds is to argue that my cases invite a conflation of epistemic justification with moral justification. On this diagnosis, the reason we intuitively want to withhold justification from Radha is because we are wary of endorsing the claim that she would be justified in acting on the belief that she deserves to be beaten. 

Why be wary of something which has no practical effect?

Likewise, we are intuitively inclined to say that Nour and Charles are epistemically justified because we would want to say that their acting on their beliefs would be justified. 

This is not the case. Nour could be sued for defamation if she goes around saying such and such guy is racist. Similarly, genuine toffs would think Charles a rank outsider for not being able to tell that his College isn't really posh. It is where the Scholarship kids get dumped if they don't shape up. 

But this, the internalist might argue, is to conflate epistemic and practical justification: 

No. It is merely to shit higher than your arsehole.

Radha’s belief is justified even if she wouldn’t be justified in acting on it,

because the word 'justified' is meaningless in this context.

 and Nour and Charles would be justified in acting on their epistemically unjustified beliefs. Insofar as these internalistic verdicts are counterintuitive, it’s because we are conflating two distinct kinds of justification. This takes us to a deep question that I cannot hope to resolve here, namely the relationship between epistemic and practical normativity. In a recent back-and forth on the a priori, Paul Boghossian and Timothy Williamson come up against just this issue. Williamson asks us to imagine a perfectly coherent Nazi. 

We don't know that there can be any such thing. Gentzen was pretty damn smart. But we can't give a coherent description of it using his methods or using a more modern intuitionistic approach. My memory is that Jean Yves Girard or perhaps some commentator on him showed that 'cut rules'- which generalize modus ponens- entail radical type theoretic incommensurability. No doubt some Cohen could force coherence- but that would be Jewish and thus not kosher for Aryans!

Is he justified, Williamson wants to know, in believing that homosexuals should be killed? 

After we sodomize them or before? Why not during? Such are the questions all coherent Nazis must face.

Boghossian, an internalist, assimilates the Nazi to the brain-in-a-vat, and concludes that the Nazi is ‘fully justified’, though of course massively in error, and says that he endorses this seemingly counterintuitive conclusion ‘wholeheartedly’ (ibid). 

This begs the question. Nazism didn't last long enough to produce a 'coherent' anything. It is true that some Religions, which do have very sophisticated epistemologies, could plausibly be said to demand utterly repugnant actions but, surely, they have a notion of 'mystery'- i.e. some sphere beyond reason. God may have created some people so they could be a witness to His infinite cruelty but why this should be so is beyond human ken. But things we can't know can't justify our doing things which are clearly against our current law. If you don't like it fuck off to some country run by like-minded zealots. 

Williamson concedes that one might worry that ‘there is something cheap about using the Nazi’ as a counterexample to internalism, since the ‘toxic nature of Nazism might prompt a moralizing attitude in which we automatically reject any positive description of the Nazi’s beliefs whatsoever’. But this, he goes on, is to miss the crucial connection between justified belief and justified action. If the Nazi is fully justified in believing that he should kill homosexuals, then why – Williamson asks – isn’t he morally justified in killing them?

Because Nazi justifications have nothing to do with morality. I'm guessing those nutters thought boys who kiss boys will show less zeal in bayoneting the enemy. There is no evidence for this view. Indeed, girls who kiss boys or girls or their pet poodles are just as capable of discharging all the duties of a soldier. 

Williamson, in other words, endorses a tight connection between practical and epistemic justification,

because he takes knowledge as a Tarskian primitive.

 which in turn makes reflection on morally and politically charged cases particularly useful for thinking about epistemic justification. 

The opposite is true. Nothing useful can be said.

On a different view, however, epistemic justification does not enjoy a close connection with moral justification.

We don't know that. Internalism 'at the end of time' might be a Theory of Everything.

 This is the sort of view that an internalist like Boghossian, who wants to insist that the Nazi is epistemically but not morally justified, should endorse. (Williamson, for his part, says that this sort of view ‘raises a question about the interest of justification in the epistemological sense, once it is severed from justification in the more general normative sense’.) 

Williamson believes there is a sharp, but unknowable, cut-off for every sorites problem. I suppose, because I'm balding, I might want to say- having two hairs on my head, like Homer Simpson, makes me non-bald. But, I might change the cut-off when I have only one hair on my head. Finally, I might the copious hairs growing out of my ears to be evidence of non-baldness. But this sort of stuff isn't philosophical.

As I said above, I do not hope to resolve this thorny issue here. But I do hope to have shown how the objection to the politically charged nature of my cases presupposes a not uncontroversial view about the relationship of epistemic to practical normativity. 

Objections to wokeness presuppose nothing. The thing is obviously shite.

Moreover, there is something to be said for the thought that the political nature of my cases underscores rather than impugns the trustworthiness of our intuitions about them. 

Whose intuitions? That of an elitist, racist, cretin.

For my cases are far less recherché than their traditional analogues. Subjects operating under conditions of misogyny, racism and classism are a commonplace (or so I think) in the actual world,

in which case, as in the film Undercover Brother II, 'the Man' (i.e. the rich, racist, homophobic White guy) is manufacturing toxic wokeness and getting it into the food supply of the Ghetto so us righteous peeps go mad and start persecuting each other rather than uniting the way Obama wants us to and thus becoming the change we want to see in the world.

 while brains-in-vats, clairvoyants and epistemology-hoaxing artists are presumably more modally remote. 

The first two may be incompossible. The third might exist.

This in turn suggests that if any intuitions should be thrown out as less reliable, it should be those we have in response to the traditional cases, rather than the new, bad ideology cases.

No. In the 'mainline' cases, no restriction is placed on reasoning and there are no privileged frames of reference. In bad ideology cases, the game is rigged. The young Arab or working class Don must be believed purely on ideological grounds. Radha can go hang coz she is a Hindu wot didn't go to Yale. 

 The diagnosis I offered in §2, in other words, not only does not impugn the reliability of our intuitions about ‘bad ideology’ cases. It also casts doubt on the trustworthiness of our intuitions about the traditional, humdrum cases we know and love.

Find something worthier of love- like a dog turd lying on the street. 

 The challenge to internalism stands.

But shits itself uncontrollably while shouting 'Boo to Neo-liberalism! Male Gaze is raping me! Fuck you Patriarchy! Fuck you very much!' 

Interestingly, Amia next gives a reason why a non-Arab could not get to make the same judgment- i.e. Wokeness has a hierarchy such that Arab trumps WASP even if they are indiscernibly identical.

Nour does have a set of non-accessible mental states: namely, the preconscious awareness of her host’s behaviour. Does Nour have a total internal duplicate whose belief that her host is racist is unjustified? Imagine Sarah, who shares all of Nour’s subconscious mental states: she subconsciously ‘sees’ and ‘hears’ subtle facial and verbal behaviours in her host. Except that Sarah’s subconscious is not picking up on actual facial and verbal behaviours, but fabricating them: she is subject to a kind of subconscious hallucination, through no fault of her own. (One might object that this surely means that Nour and Sarah have different subconscious mental states; but recall that mental state internalists think that internal duplicates must share only non-factive mental states.) Is Sarah’s belief that the host is racist justified? I think the answer is, quite plausibly, not. If so, then Nour does have a total internal duplicate who differs in justification – meaning that RACIST DINNER TABLE is a counterexample to mental state as well as access internalism. My challenge thus generalises to internalism simpliciter.

Wonderful! Sarah is fucked coz she don't got an Arab name. Amia has a Hindu name but is properly dismissive of Radhas and thus the Nour she fabricates gets to be the arbiter against whom there can be no appeal. 

Conclusion: externalism as a normative epistemology It’s often said that externalism is not a ‘normative’ epistemology. This is said by both internalists and externalists. Internalists mean it as a criticism: any epistemology worth having must be a normative epistemology, so externalism isn’t worth having. Externalists mean it as an explanation: they simply aren’t in the game of normative theorising, which is why their theory implies that blameless people (like JaneBIV) can be unjustified and irresponsible people (like Norman and Mary) can be justified. That externalism is not a ‘normative’ theory is also taken to explain why externalist theories are not ‘action-guiding’, in the sense of being operationalizable by agents under conditions of uncertainty or ignorance. By contrast, an internalist epistemology, which articulates its justification-norms in terms of the subject’s own perspective, can always be used to guide one’s own epistemic actions, and neatly tracks whether the subject is blameworthy or blameless. 

Anything at all can be made normative or have normativity subtracted from it. What matters is this shite hasn't guided any actions whatsoever outside this citation cartel circle jerk. 

 Internalism treats believers as normative agents, we say, while externalism treats them like mere thermometers.

Do they stick those thermometers up internalists bums? If not, why not? The thing might pay for itself on TikTok.

 All this assumes that what it is to be a normative theory is to talk in terms that are familiar to us from ethics: blameworthiness and blamelessness, responsibility, action-guidance. But we might think this an overly restrictive notion of a normative theory (in ethics as well as epistemology). Marxism, for example, is arguably a normative theory, in the sense that it is responsive to the gap between how things are and how things should be. 

Very true. He said everybody should receive according to his contribution- no fucking taxes or interest payments or rent payments- till scarcity ends thanks to some technological miracle. Chinese Marxists embraced this Marxist doctrine to smash the 'iron rice bowl' and advance rapidly through pro-market policies.

But Marx was uninterested in the questions of what any given individual ought to do or who is to be blamed – concerns that he dismissed as typically bourgeois. Aristotle meanwhile thought the question of whether something is a good version of its kind – whether a citizen is a good citizen, or whether a thermometer is a good thermometer – was the paradigmatic normative question. And yet Aristotle thought that being a good version of one’s kind is not something that lies solely within the will of that thing. Virtue requires being embedded in a cooperative world. For Aristotle this dependency of the normative goods on ‘external’ facts appears to be a natural consequence of humans’ social existence: the things most worth having are those we can only have through our relationships with others.

Then his pupil, Alexander, showed that what was cooler yet was conquering others and making them worship you as a God Emperor. 

 So too, the externalist thinks, with epistemic goods: the epistemic goods really worth having are those that cannot be had by mere individual effort.

No epistemic good can be had without individual effort. This is the reason, though attending Collidge, I remained as stupid as shit. 

 It is in this sense that externalism is, or can be, a normative epistemology.

But, in this sense, so can my neighbor's cat saying miaow. There must always be 'at the end of time' and algorithmic way of turning that sequence of feline sounds into the Theory of Everything.

 One way of reading this paper is as I’ve presented it – as a straightforward argument against epistemic internalism and, ipso facto, for externalism. On this reading, my cases present a challenge to the internalist, one that demands that she say something about why these cases do not threaten her view of things

Amia is demanding that we tell her the cases she presents are fucked in the head.

. I would be happy to hear from internalists how this challenge might be met. 

Amia would not be happy to hear from me. Nobody is but people of South Indian heritage more so than anybody else. There is something about my accent which strikes fear into their hearts. I'm probably some uncouth relative who will demand hospitality and then try to arrange their marriage with some equally gormless nephew of mine. 

But I would be just as happy – happier even – to have this paper read as an explanation of why, for at least some of us, externalism is attractive as a genuinely normative theory of justification and knowledge.

It justifies the most virulent and counterproductive type of Wokeness. 

Insofar as one thinks, as I do, that we live in a world suffused with bad ideology –

Amia does coz that bad ideology is silently, incessantly, venting out of her arsehole. In Sanskrit there is a saying Daramburam bhyam naasthi. Nishabdam prana sankatam. My Socioproctology is a loud fart. Amia's Psilosophy is silent but deadly.

insofar, we might say, that one’s view of the world is a radical one – an epistemology that is capable of operating in terms of structural notions becomes more attractive than one that can trade only in individualistic ones. 

What 'structural notions' can Wokeness provide us with? I get to shit on Amia coz I'm less educated than her. She gets to shit on peeps wot are whiter than her. Where will this end? Must Trump get re-elected or Bo-Jo continue to reside at Number 10 for ten more years before Wokeness is banished from the Campus?

One might be an externalist, in other words, not in spite of externalism’s detachment from the individualistic normative notions we hold dear, but precisely because of it.

One might pretend to do Philosophy simply so as to broadcast the sort of virulent Wokeness Obama warned against.