(1) has come out of my mouth on a few occasions, albeit not in those exact words. It’s normally after a few beers and I feel like playing the extreme skeptic a la David Hume, just to annoy everyone. I think the best way around it is to resort to the empirical argument and say that, in our experience, it is always right: Essentially the same thing Yudkowsky does with PA arithmetic here. Trying to find an argument against it which is truly “rationalist” in the continental sense has been a dead end in my experience.
(2) sort of depends on the pragmatics and what “tolerance” actually means to the persons involved in a given context. If you define tolerance as simply being tolerant of other viewpoints, then you can still be tolerant of the intolerant viewpoints. However, if you define it as freedom from bigotry, then that could indeed be called “intolerant” by the standards of the first definition.
(1) has come out of my mouth on a few occasions, albeit not in those exact words. It’s normally after a few beers and I feel like playing the extreme skeptic a la David Hume, just to annoy everyone. I think the best way around it is to resort to the empirical argument and say that, in our experience, it is always right: Essentially the same thing Yudkowsky does with PA arithmetic here. Trying to find an argument against it which is truly “rationalist” in the continental sense has been a dead end in my experience.
(2) sort of depends on the pragmatics and what “tolerance” actually means to the persons involved in a given context. If you define tolerance as simply being tolerant of other viewpoints, then you can still be tolerant of the intolerant viewpoints. However, if you define it as freedom from bigotry, then that could indeed be called “intolerant” by the standards of the first definition.
I hope I’m making sense here.