Obviously I’m not a fan of Dawkins. I haven’t read any of his work, but from the various clips and quotes of his I’ve seen over the years he strikes me as an incurious bigot with a blinkered worldview. But I have no reason to doubt that he is a smart man.
So it’s very funny to see him realize that he’s debating a genuinely delusional person, as Peterson makes some bizarre epistemological argument that dragons are literally real because we use the concept of predator as a shorthand for animals that kill other animals. Except Peterson seems to expand the definition of predator to “anything that can kill a person” when he argues that fire is a predator.
Peterson is doing the exact sort of postmodernism he rallies against, isn’t he? He always does this, he circled around something that almost had a point, that has a tinge of reality to it, but he swirls around in desultoey psuedo-philosphy jargon so that he never has to be pinned down as saying one thing or another.
Actual philosophers will define and redefine their terms, especially if they know they’re using the terms in ways that aren’t standard. Like Delueze/Guattari make it explicitly clear that rhizomatic and arborescent are not botanical terms and aren’t referring to literal trees, even though they’re borrowing biological terms. Foucault uses the term archaeology in a non-standard way too, but he knows he’s doing that.
I haven’t watched this whole thing and I probably won’t, but it sounds like Peterson just wants to say that the immaterial is a real thing, that meta-analysis refers to genuine Platonic forms in the ether. Otherwise what is he even saying. He’s saying dragon is a shorthand for “threat” and that biology is something like “human capacity.” So he’s almost got a point in that the conception of a dragon is biological in the sense that human biology has cooked up the concept of a dragon out of various threatening features to us as humans. It’s a big monster made of the things that would kill us, and our conception of what kills us is informed by our biology and surroundings. Different cultures have had different ideas of monsters that had to do with animals they found threatening. But he’s shouting over how the other two aren’t accepting his exact terminology, even though he’s failing to define his terms?
You could probably do a cool analysis on how early myths/legends had a lot of fierce beasts who attack humans, but now more of our monster ideas are more human-shaped. Like back then you had monsters like trolls or minotaurs, but now monsters are like zombies and vampires. You could make a cool point about how our more primal fears have become more like fears relating to our class and social position, like zombies representing mass unrest or vampires being upper class bloodsuckers.
Hey look I explained how one could talk about dragons in biological terms without shouting at Richard Dawkins or looking like my brain got scrambled on benzos