The reason you find this question strange is because you live in the strange world of Metaphysics. Otherwise, it is a very straightforward question.
I live in many worlds, tbh. That's why I asked all of those questions.
Standford is like the Vatican of normie religion.
I reject this premise. First, you have to define what "normie religion" is. Are you referring to science, or simply the way in which popular culture views the establishment intellectuals as the authority on knowledge? I'm going to assume that you're just referring to them as the secular replacement for some authority that would need to exist as a general placeholder to fulfil that same role in society. Second, you're arguing against the source by characterizing it as some kind of religion (which comes with its attendant dogmas, naturally), but you're positing a kind of religion of your own in place of it. Not calling you a hypocrite, but you have to accept the inconsistency there.
It supports everything we stand against as Incels.
What is it that we stand for? Who is we, precisely? Incels are not a monolithic group. We, as individuals, come from every demographic group, every creed, every philosophy, every socio-economic strata. There is everyone here from broke NEETs who LDAR all day to millionaires to atheists and devout religious people.
In my book, this makes them a-priori untrustworthy on other matters as well. This is the way it works in criminal justice, for example. If a witness has a criminal record, it will make him less trustworthy than someone who hasn't.
Is it the institution of universities you mistrust or this specific organization? I'm going to assume the former, since you characterized Stanford as a kind of "Vatican."
I do trust certain philosophers, like Wittgenstein or Kant. But I don't trust philosophy in general.
Your approach is misguided. You're coming at this from the wrong angle. A philosopher, or philosophy itself, is not something you "trust." You observe the reasoning and the arguments. Logic doesn't need to be trusted, it simply needs to be consistent, followed and understood. The mouthpiece is generally irrelevant (except when you're writing a paper and need to reference an idea).
In particular, I do not trust Edward N. Zalta (the editor of SEP) and I do not trust Michael Glanzberg (the author of the "Truth" article you linked) Both are leftists of the worst kind, supporting feminism, transgender crap and all the rest. As a result, I do not trust them regarding what they say about the philosophical understanding of Truth.
As I just said, if what they say is valid and sound, their ideological baggage is irrelevant. If a homeless man gives you the same financial advice as the successful multimillionaire, you will reject it because of the source? If you do, that's not very wise. Take things on their own merits.
Indeed, while reading the article, I see that they do not mention Kant at all, although the famous ("we cannot know things in themselves (ding an sich)") is obviously an attack on Truth.
Kant's nuomena argues that we cannot fully know the thing in itself. This is valid, but from this you cannot make the inference and logically deny the truth of the thing in question, or that the truth of it exists in the first place, merely because of the gap between it and our perception of it. Yes, the best we can hope for is a close, best approximation, but this natural limitation does not justify disposing the concept of truth altogether in favor of trust, which is by far flimsier. If truth is limited by perception (because our biology won't allow us to cross the subjective-objective chasm), then trust is limited even further by the previous fact as well as an empirical requirement of the history of the object to which trust is assigned, which itself can be changed in the future, meaning that it's less stable (read: reliable) than truth.
Wittgenstein, for his part is mentioned only in relation to the Tractatus, which he repudiated in his later philosophy. The Philosophical Investigations, which is considered one of the major philosophical works of the XXth century, is not mentioned at all although it the most radical rejection of the philosophical idea of truth that you can find.
Wittgenstein himself was a philosopher of language and he argued that mystical truths cannot be meaningfully expressed in language. This is probably where you hang-up with truth is. You seem to think that because some kind of absolute truth cannot meaningfully be expressed in language, as Wittgenstein claims, then "truth" itself is meaningless and we should discard it. This is the most tragic case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, if I've ever seen one.
Bottom line: this is a disingenuous presentation of the spectrum of philosophical positions about truth. To be honest, it should be divided in 2 parts: those who promote the idea of Truth, those who reject it. Instead, it speaks only of the first category.
The notion of "accepting truth" vs "rejecting truth" is absurd. How are you even arguing this? The important thing in the linked entry are theories of truth.
Philosophical Investigations didn't introduce a new theory, it commented on the difference between "truth" and "truthfulness" as it pertains to its language representation in propositional calculus. He didn't
reject truth.
So I now have 2 reasons not to trust them: 1) they associate with positions that I find abhorrent (feminism, etc.)
The emotional objection is noted. But do yourself a favor and look for traces of these positions in the referenced section.
2) they are disingenuous pseudo-experts who present their own discipline in a biased way.
This is personal evaluation aka it's just, like, your opinion, man. Only an expert can call another a pseudo-expert.
Finding 1. had prepared me to 2. When I read the article, I discovered finding 2. which was a confirmation of finding 1) and told me that my initial mistrust was well founded.
Well, that's on you. Like I said, take things on their own merits.
Finding 2. is increasingly applicable to all so-called "experts". Normie religion, because it is a religion, trumps honest expertise and forces "experts" to toe the line.
What is this? Who determines what's "honest expertise"? Whoever you trust? You're suggesting that you're relying an awful lot on feelings and subjectivity here.
As a result, experts are increasingly untrustworthy. However, even when they were, it was not because they were "telling the truth" (nobody will ever know if that was the case), but because they had established a track record of credibility. How exactly they did that is another matter that would be too long to discuss here.
Feel free to share your opinions, so long as you can defend them.
As a result, I have answered all your questions in a manner that should normally make anyone rethink his reliance on "Truth"
No, sorry. What you've done is establish your distrust of one particular source, because of the affiliations that source with ideas you don't subscribe to. That's fine, but then you've asserted that these affiliations make them pseudo-experts. That doesn't necessarily follow.
No, this is not implicit at all. What I am saying is that the concept of "Truth" is a form of superstition, like unicorns or lucky charms. It doesn't exist. Like these, it is used to manipulate people.
This is the point I was talking about earlier when I said we can't see eye to eye. When we get down to brass tacks you're saying something that, to me, is categorically and patently absurd.
Maybe but we will never know anything about these facts. This is what Kant means with his "we cannot know things in themselves (ding an sich)". The "things" or the "facts" are forever inaccessible to us directly. We only have testimonies. Testimonies of our sense or Testimonies of other people. The Testimonies of our senses are not particularly reliable (hallucinations, unconscious bias, etc.)
I addressed this in parts earlier when I mentioned his nuomena. We can obtain close best approximations that are independent from us (readings on the meters will be the same, regardless of whom with whatever worldview observes the meter).
Instruments, for their part, may be faulty; they may have been manufactured by biased or incompetent people, etc. They are also give us mere testimonies.
See, I expected you to go here. The problem with this argument (and it's an easy one to deal with) is that you can have two different people who are verifiably competent with polar opposite viewpoints, trustworthiness, whatever, who can build the exact same instrument, which can be then checked by a third party. The "testimony" of the device, then, can not be argued against as a source of fact(s) about the thing(s) it measures from which truth(s) can be derived.
That is why we say: "I cannot believe my eyes" when we are looking at a voltmeter, say, that is giving us a reading that we do not expect. This point of view is what we call today the "Brain in a Vat" argument, which is essentially a reformulation of Berkley's philosophy.
Berkley should have conversed more with scientists, builders, and engineers.
The fact that I need to remind you of all this, although it is quite well known, means that you have a naive understanding of philosophy and/or that you have been manipulated by unscrupulous philosophers (like those of SEP). Philosophy is dangerous when it is understood superficially. This is how generations of young people have been lead to follow Stalin and other murderers in their horrendous real-life experiments.
The only dangerous thing here is to presuppose another's understanding (or lack thereof) of philosophy.
Plato was the biggest sand-dune builder of all times. There are no Platonic solids in nature no more than there is any Platonic love. Don't be fooled.
This is my point. There exist truths that are independent of nature. Many of these truths can be obtained through the scientific method and are classified as empirical facts. Not all facts are empirical (it is a fact that I prefer chocolate over vanilla, but you can't measure that--you ask me for that fact) and not all truths can be obtained by facts e.g. mathematical truths.
