[lucajona]

Those "anti-intellectual slogans" I think you mean can also be seen as arguments for a return to enlightenment values instead of an entrenched, elitist dogmatism.

Behind those slogans is the idea that intellectual life doesn't belong to a chosen few, but to everyone who's interested and willing to engage their capacity for independent thought and critical thinking, and those who are willing and eager to engage with other people with different opinions.

[marklgr]

A lot of arguments can be seen as sensible until one realizes they were pushed by people with a hidden agenda. It's often just the motte part of motte-and-bailey arguments.

That's why there are people (eg. in Europe) who aggressively promote secularism, and many agree with that, until you find out they belong to some hateful anti-islam organization. And that's why some people put science into question, like, how can we be sure of anything, which is defensible from an epistemological standpoint, until you discover they are creationists.

So you want to be careful before giving random people the benefit of the doubt.

[dnautics]

does 'being pushed by people with a hidden agenda' automatically invalidate something? I'd say that that the American (and presumably European) political establishment (both the right and the left) have a 'hidden agenda' of pushing science because it creates a higher authority that they can appeal to justify questionable policy choices. That doesn't mean I think all science is wrong.

[marklgr]

It does not invalidate anything, but that's beside the point; it's not about valid or invalid arguments (their first one is almost always valid or defensible), it's about getting into what you might think is a honest discussion whose purpose is to find out the truth, whereas your interlocutor's purpose is to unroll their rhetoric and influence you or the audience, according to their hidden agenda. While you're only paying attention to logic and validity, they win points and convince people around.

[eli_gottlieb]

>And that's why some people put science into question, like, how can we be sure of anything, which is defensible from an epistemological standpoint, until you discover they are creationists.

Honestly, if skeptical arguments in epistemology can be used to strengthen Creationism, I think that's a major point against taking them seriously in epistemology. Good epistemology ought to have a low enough false-positive rate (disbelieving things when they're true) to throw out "all the evidence is wrong, because I got this book someone wrote a while ago".