From: Chris Hibbert (chris@pancrit.org)
Date: Sun Jul 28 2002 - 00:44:40 MDT
Technotranscendence wrote:
> I think pancritical rationalism is not enough to sustain a whole
> philosophy or a whole methodology. See my comments at
> http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/PCR.html
I took a look at it. The criticism of PCR appears to be that it
accepts, for example, sense perception and logical consistency as
foundations, while claiming not to accept any foundations as
sufficient to justify knowledge.
I think the criticism misses the mark. My interpretation of PCR is
that it rejects any single foundation for reasoning. It uses a
toolkit instead. Any single foundational rule will lead to errors
of various sorts. skepticism, theism, and solipsism are all based
on taking a single rule and applying it pervasively.
PCR instead starts by taking an agnostic position. There are all
these reasoning tools in the world. They make different claims
about how to best evaluate competing claims. Let's evaluate each
of them using the others, and see what we learn.
Some of them work well, and lead to clear thinking and useful
approaches to discovering more facts about the world. Others are
self consistent, but don't seem to lead anywhere. Some are just
muddled and leave you with no clear answer as to how to proceed.
(Or have an unbound variable in their argument; lots of different
proposals say to accept some particular authority. The reasoning
behind this approach doesn't tell how to choose the authority.)
I don't think PCR accepts any single approach as its foundation. It
evaluates sense perceptions, self-consistency, occam's razor as well
as other reasoning tools and finds them useful. It rejects
justification as a justification, and seeks falsifiable theories and
lack of refutation.
I admit I had trouble reading the article above. Would you care to
explain what I missed? What's wrong with PCR?
Chris
--
Currently reading: Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance
Judea Pearl, Causality; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Chris Hibbert
http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert
chris@pancrit.org
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