Actually, I am impressed with the clarity of your definition. Your first meaning I would simply call “valid” because its truth depends upon the truth of the axioms.
Truth as correspondence between external reality and mental image is exactly how I would have defined it myself. So, common ground. Yay!
A champagne is called for! Prosit and cheers.
Even yelling “Fire!” in the theater? How about brainwashing someone in a cult? What about when individuals are not free not to listen to the ideas? For instance, if you came to work everyday and were verbally assaulted by your co-workers who hurled every imaginable insult at you… everyday. They are just expressing their ideas, right? Does it matter that it is not possible for you to avoid listening to it?
You mention several things here.
One is the obvious exception, the famous “yelling fire in a theater”. In general, creating an
obvious, physical harm by disseminating
false information. This is not a discourse of ideas, this is deliberately causing harm to others by creating a panic. What about the case when
there is a a fire in that theater? If there in a fire, there cannot be “opposing” viewpoints about it. A very far cry from asserting/denying the existence of a deity.
The other belongs to the slander/libel type of causing harm to others. This is a bit more complicated. How do you know
ahead of the time, which utterance will be slanderous? In the US there used to be a law, which prohibited to say “negative” things about members of the goverment,
even if they were true! Fortunately for us, a brave journalist dared to challenge this law, was brought to court, and the jury annulled the law.
This is why we have the legal system, and specifically the jury system. Bad laws should not go unchallenged, even if they get on the books. But you cannot preempt it, unfortunately. Precisely because we are not perfect, we cannot know which idea will bear fruit and which one will not.
In the third one you ask about the brainwashing in a cult. I must answer with another semi-joke. Question: Who belongs to a “cult”? Answer: “everyone who attends the church next to yours.” It sounds like a joke, but it is dead serious. What will happen if and when some authority will declare that Catholicism is a “cult”, and the Catholic way of teaching children is “brainwashing” and should be forbidden?
Peaceful discourse? Is advocating violence peaceful discourse if you are not actually commiting physical violence when so advocating? Should an Imam be allowed to encourage his students to engage in suicide attacks even if he doesn’t do them himself? It is often joked that modern society is tolerant of everything except intolerance, which to a large degree is true. The marketplace of ideas cannot be maintained without suppressing intolerance to some degree.
I agree. To
some degree. But that intolerance cannot come from
a-priori suppressing some ideas, it must come from
a-posteriori punishing some actions.
I know you meant it as something of a joke, but of course Cain’s quote in the Book of Genesis is meant to be highly ironic. Each one of us does have some kind of responsibility or each other, especially in cases of authority, i.e. a leader is the keeper of his people, a parent the keeper of his children, a bishop the keeper of those in his flock.
We certainly have some responsibility to others. Again, the problem is that none of us is smart enough to foresee the all the ramifications of all ideas, that might come forth in an open marketplace.
Even in the marketplace analogy, we find the need for laws and enforcement to keep certain kinds of persons out of the market. The con man, for instance, who claims his product does one thing, when in reality it doesn’t. Any kind of fraud.
Just as fraudlant products are banned from the market, should not fraudlant ideas be kept from those who might unwittingly adopt them?
I will risk of being boring by making repetitions. How do you know ahead of the time, which product or idea will prove to be fradulent and which one is genuine? Only by testing them. Sure, after the test proves that a product is just another “snake-oil”, it is prudent to forbid its sale. How do you plan to do this with ideas?
Perhaps if man were not flawed he could be trusted to operate wisely in the marketplace, but the fact of the matter is that man is often inclined to pursue that which is not good for him (this is something the Enlightenment denied arguing for a pure state of nature which is utterly silly and defies all human experience).
I say the exact opposite.
Precisely because we are flawed, because we are not omniscient we need the marketplace. And we come to the same question again: “
who will decide what is good for you?”. Will it be some authority, who will decide? No matter who or what that authority might be, it cannot know what you want to pursue as you do. Maybe the authority has more information, and that is very likely the case. In that case the authority should make that information available in the form of an advice - but never as a decree, forbidding some activity which is not physically harmful to others.
Take the prohibition of importing drugs for your own use. There are people with AIDS, who wish to try anything and everything in desperation. They are aware of the risks they take, when wanting to try unapproved drugs. They know that the chance of helping them is small. But it is not the role of any authority to forbid to take those drugs - to be precise: it should not be.
No, it is my or your job to declare which thoughts are “intrinsically harmful”. And it is not our job to declare that some people are intellectually immature to hear messages, we happen to disagree with. Yes, there is a certain chance that people will be influenced. But this is a small price to pay if one considers the alternative, namely that some proclaimed “authority” will decide, which ideas can be heard, and which ones cannot. And there is a very good reason for this. It is obvious that the diverse ideas of millions of ordinary people trump the knowledge of a few hundred or thousand of “experts”. No matter how smart those “experts” are, they cannot think of more new ideas than those millions can.
Confusing reality with the mental image of reality serves no purpose other than confusion - for the sake of a cutesy but false slogan.