The real stakes seem to be about whether methodological naturalism in science not only disproves fundamentalism (which Peterson seems to accept) but also compels us to abandon religious language or if we can psychologize it, as James did and Peterson wants to, or otherwise naturalize it. I think Dawkins is the one in the bind here, because as a friend of Sam Harris, he is willing to accept the legitimacy of naturalizing Therevadan Buddhism, which in historical actuality involved all kinds of supernatural claims, as a useful source of insight into consciousness and self-destructive behaviours. His wingman also was the one who was defending an expressivist view of moral discourse, which could surely be extended to religious or mythological discourse.
I would go with critical support for Peterson here. He obviously was not making the claim that dragons are appropriate entities in biology, nor is he merely claiming that people have had ideas of dragons. What he is claiming -- and he may be right or wrong about this -- is that stories about dragons reveal psychological truth that modern empirical psychology misses. If he is right, then "dragons" are *useful* concepts in psychology, and therefore have the same kind of reality that Freudians claim for the superego or psychometricians claim for OCEAN metrics of personality. This is the same kind of reality that genes have (since a sequence of DNA only becomes a gene if it has the functional role of encoding for a phenotypic trait).
If Dawkins' claim that he is not interested in dragons is more than just an observation about his own psychology, then it could be interpreted either as saying that biology, as a science, is not interested in dragons (which is true but misses the point) or that dragon stories have no interesting psychological insights (which would actually be engaging Peterson, but which Dawkins does not actually try to do).
Quine's theory of what is is ultimately a pragmatic one. He doesn't want to say that only things that take up spatiotemporal room exist, because he wants to allow the existence of the empty set or the highest prime number less than a billion. So he says that entities exist if you quantify over them in scientifically or mathematically useful statements. But since he can't claim that psychology is a finished science, he can't really dispute that dragons might be things that you have to quantify over in psychology.
Lewis made the valid argument that Quine's definition implied that possible-but-not-actual worlds exist (or are real), since modal logic requires quantification over such worlds. I think that is actually a good reason to reject Quine's approach to existence or reality, since if there is anything that does not exist it is a possible-but-not-actual world. Certainly if such worlds exist, there be dragons in them.
The real stakes seem to be about whether methodological naturalism in science not only disproves fundamentalism (which Peterson seems to accept) but also compels us to abandon religious language or if we can psychologize it, as James did and Peterson wants to, or otherwise naturalize it. I think Dawkins is the one in the bind here, because as a friend of Sam Harris, he is willing to accept the legitimacy of naturalizing Therevadan Buddhism, which in historical actuality involved all kinds of supernatural claims, as a useful source of insight into consciousness and self-destructive behaviours. His wingman also was the one who was defending an expressivist view of moral discourse, which could surely be extended to religious or mythological discourse.
I would go with critical support for Peterson here. He obviously was not making the claim that dragons are appropriate entities in biology, nor is he merely claiming that people have had ideas of dragons. What he is claiming -- and he may be right or wrong about this -- is that stories about dragons reveal psychological truth that modern empirical psychology misses. If he is right, then "dragons" are *useful* concepts in psychology, and therefore have the same kind of reality that Freudians claim for the superego or psychometricians claim for OCEAN metrics of personality. This is the same kind of reality that genes have (since a sequence of DNA only becomes a gene if it has the functional role of encoding for a phenotypic trait).
If Dawkins' claim that he is not interested in dragons is more than just an observation about his own psychology, then it could be interpreted either as saying that biology, as a science, is not interested in dragons (which is true but misses the point) or that dragon stories have no interesting psychological insights (which would actually be engaging Peterson, but which Dawkins does not actually try to do).
Quine's theory of what is is ultimately a pragmatic one. He doesn't want to say that only things that take up spatiotemporal room exist, because he wants to allow the existence of the empty set or the highest prime number less than a billion. So he says that entities exist if you quantify over them in scientifically or mathematically useful statements. But since he can't claim that psychology is a finished science, he can't really dispute that dragons might be things that you have to quantify over in psychology.
Lewis made the valid argument that Quine's definition implied that possible-but-not-actual worlds exist (or are real), since modal logic requires quantification over such worlds. I think that is actually a good reason to reject Quine's approach to existence or reality, since if there is anything that does not exist it is a possible-but-not-actual world. Certainly if such worlds exist, there be dragons in them.