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Sure. But, what else is there to do but press onward anyway?
In order to get an actual understanding of the Culture War, which is this forum's raison d'être, you have to theorize about the psychological and material motivations of different factions and individuals, you have to produce a unified narrative of historical causes, you have to take an accounting of the ethics and implied metaphysics of different positions, you have to have some notion of the aims of political activity in general... in short, you have to do philosophy.
Without a theoretical account of the Culture War and its constitutive elements, the forum is reduced to simply giving a factual account of current events, along with perhaps some strategizing and some sentimental commiserating with people who are on the same "side" as you. In other words, you'd just be fumbling about in the dark without any understanding of what's going on. A mere subject of historical forces rather than someone who might hope to know them.
Science is not exempt from politics and emotion. Otherwise, empirical research into race and sex differences, or even just IQ, wouldn't be as touchy as it is. Researchers get invested in their own theories all the time even when there's no overt political content, "science advances one funeral at a time", etc.
We just went over this. It certainly seems to be the case that philosophical claims are either true or false, just like most of the other ordinary types of claims that we're familiar with. MTF transsexuals are either women, or they aren't. There are either mind-independent ethical facts, or there aren't. There is either at least one conscious entity, or there isn't. The ground truth that these claims answer to is the same ground truth that everything else answers to: the facts of reality.
Of course, there have been many attempts throughout the history of philosophy to show that individual philosophical questions or classes of questions are in fact meaningless (in the neither-true-nor-false sense), contrary to initial appearances. But these types of arguments too depend on their own non-trivial assertions about reality.
It's true, our present lack of intellectual diversity isn't really conducive to good discussion. But we still have substantial disagreements on this forum regarding AI, race and immigration, the ethics of sexuality, etc.
They're not "touchy", there's just an effort to censor one (or more) side. Maybe because there is in fact a fact of the matter one can appeal to.
The claim was not that the process of science cannot be corrupted. The claim was that there's at least some theoretical yardstick some evidence that could be offered on many issues or some prediction that could be validated. The people who do things like try to stop genetic data being available for intelligence research or studies being done on smoking or gun deaths aren't evidence for the other side, they are proof for the claim: both sides seem to have some sense of where the confirming or disconfirming evidence is, one side has simply decided to defect.
And nothing can really eliminate the risk of defection so it's hardly damning for science that some do.
There is (seemingly) no (obvious) empirical fact that will settle the debate over whether MTF transsexuals are women, and yet the claim "Caitlin Jenner is still a man" would be censured very aggressively in lefty spaces.
The same goes for religious claims, ethical claims, all sorts of claims for which no empirical verification is possible.
I previously argued that a sentence need not be empirically verifiable in order to be meaningful or truth-apt in general. So, if you're trying to assert that "being able to answer to a ground truth" just is the same as "being empirically verifiable", I would reject that.
I think there's a difference between censoring speech made for claims that we cannot really settle beyond raw power or tolerance and censoring research that theoretically can settle those claims. It leads to a strange agreement between the censor and their victim on the stakes in a way that doesn't have to be true in other case.
Maybe Frankfurt's distinction between lying and bullshit - lying at least acknowledges the concept of truth even as you point people away from it, bullshit denies that the truth is meaningful in the first place.
Yes, statements can be truth-apt without being empirically verifiable in practice. OrAnd there are cases where the stakes or what would settle the issue are themselves in doubt. In which case there's nothing for it but philosophy I suppose , since that's the role it can maintain in a world where science is ascendant.
I think a lot of the actual culture war debates do not escape empiricism in practice though, even if people try to insist that it's just a matter of differing definitions floating in the ether.
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This seems like the worst possible example - “Are transwomen women?” seems to be a question where 90% or the disagreement about the meaning of the word “woman” and only 10% about ground truth.
If you exclude people who believe in intrinsically gendered souls (for whom the question, “Can female souls be incarnated in male bodies?” is meaningful even if the correct answer is unknowable with mortal technology) I don’t think you would get any disagreement on questions like “Does Caitlin Jenner have testicles?” or “Does Caitlin Jenner have a considered, sincere belief that she is supposed to be a woman?”
Its not really a disagreement about the meaning of the word "woman" because if it was, the trans movement would have a consistent and coherent answer to the WIAW question.
And you just refuted the transactivist point of view by making an obviously correct argument about the meaning of words.
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Oh but you would!
Mereological nihilists deny the existence of testicles because they deny the existence of compound physical objects in general (often because of the same Sorites-style arguments that people use to attack conservative ontologies of gender in the first place).
Eliminative materialists deny the existence of beliefs, so they would deny that anyone believes that they are a man or a woman.
So, it turns out to be rather difficult to cleanly divide sentences into two groups of "these are the nice empirical truths that we can be certain of" and "these are the nonsensical philosophical claims that just come down to verbal disputes", because it turns out that almost every sentence you can think of is ultimately the subject of philosophical disagreement.
If you think there is a ground truth of the matter over whether testicles and beliefs exist, in spite of the philosophical disagreement concerning their existence, then it's not clear why you wouldn't think that there is a ground truth of the matter over whether women exist too (along with, presumably, some sort of criteria for determining whether an entity counts as a woman or not).
Both of which are extreme minority views held by a tiny number of people that even other philosophers mostly think are wankers.
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... and mereological nihilists and eliminative materialists have negligible relevance to any actually existing argument about this subject. Certainly below the lizardman constant.
"I don't think you would get any disagreement on" doesn't mean "literally 0.0000 percent disagreement".
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How is the meaning of the word "woman" separate from the ground truth? The argument of the gender critical side is that the trans definition of woman is simply incoherent and anything close to the traditional definition simply returns false for the TWAW claim.
If anything, the idea that these things can be split has been mercifully killed by trans activists themselves: they claim some sort of sharp distinction but in practice what's happened is that anyone claiming the right to the term "woman" has at least a claim on all female privileges and rights no matter how self-evidently absurd it is.
So either the definition of trans is self-evidently incoherent or it's making a claim about the underlying facts (e.g. trans-identifying males are closer to females in their offending patterns in prison).
The trans-inclusive definition of "woman" is self-evidently incoherent. But pointing that out is an argument about the meaning of words, not about what Caitlyn Jenner is.
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