From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Mon Jul 29 2002 - 05:42:35 MDT
On Sunday, July 28, 2002 2:44 AM Chris Hibbert chris@pancrit.org 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.
Thanks. It was posted to this list years ago and was answered only by
two others. One of those responses was snide and merely an ad hominem
attack. I'm happy you did not choose the same route...
> 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.
Not at all. My claim is that propositional knowledge is ultimately
based on a nonpropositional foundation. That foundation is sense
perception. In this area, I generally accept the work of David Kelley.
See his _The Evidence of the Senses_. (I reviewed this book in _The
Thought_ and that review is now online at
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Percept.html )
(I would separate out here the origins of a particular idea or theory
from the validation of that idea of theory. (Justification is only one
kind of validation.) Someone might come up with an idea by guessing or
analogy or using a ouija board. I know most evolutionary
epistemologists make the same distinction...)
Evne if my view here is wrong, this does not mean my other claims about
pancritical rationalism ring false. Pancritical rationalism still
genetically depends on the very things it claims to be free of and free
to criticize, such as the usual laws of logic.
> 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.
There still has to be a way of figuring out which items fit into the
toolkit. Is reading tea leaves okay? What about Christian theology?
How about using Jungian archetypes? If you say these don't mesh with
some other things -- such as sense perception or classical physics --
how can you decide which should go? If you accept everything and
anything, then how can you decide conflicts at all?
> 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.
Evaluation implies a means of evaluation and a standard against which to
evaluate. This does not mean such means are carved in marble and
immutable, but the standard must be outside the thing to be evaluated.
This also does not mean that evaluation is a simple matter and always
yield incorrigible results. (One wouldn't, I hope, give up logic
because some people make mistakes in reasoning -- any more than one
would give up science because scientists make mistakes. (I know, too,
some mistakes are productive.))
> Some of them work well, and lead to clear thinking and useful
> approaches to discovering more facts about the world.
There you have it! How do you know they "work well" and "lead to clear
thinking and useful approaches to discovering more facts about the
world"? You have given three standards outside of pancritical
rationalism in one sentence.:) Taking the first first, working can only
be judged by knowing what they work for. I take this to mean sense
perception. For example, I know Newtonian mechanics works well in
predicting the period of a pendulum -- provided the anlge of its
movement is slight and other factors (air resistence) are negligible --
by observation. I don't just do the calculations and say, "Gee, the
equations are pretty and precise."
"Clear thinking," I take to mean that one has a clear understanding of
what things in a given theory mean, such as, to stick with Newtonian
physics, an unambiguous idea of what is meant by "force" and "mass" as
well as "uniform linear motion" and "acceleration." (Not that these
ideas are intensionally resolveable int osome sort of Platonic
definitions, but extensionally resolvable in such a way that I won't
confuse force, mass, acceleration and velocity... And all of this fits
together somewhat coherently. (I use "somewhat" because any given
theory or idea will have some fuzziness.) If you mean something else,
please explain.
By "discovering more facts about the world," you would still have to
have some notion, however precise or fuzzy, of what qualifies as a fact
about the world. With science, this is generally facts about the
external world and observation is generally the key to this. (Of
course, at a higher level, there's fitting particular observations
together into a coherent whole and even allowing for things like
experimental error. Coherence and correspondence in truth and facts are
not in competition here, but mesh together.) If so, then, again, you
have a foundation outside of pancritical rationalism.
> 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.)
Yeap, but this does not speak to the matter at hand.
> 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 don't rail against using falsification in my piece or now. It's a
great technique, but it's not the whole toolkit nor is it the only
method that works on a metalevel. Logical consistency and
correspondence with the facts are two other methods, for example.
(Granted, usually in large theories, consistency is not easy to judge
and auxiliary hypothesis lead to different correspondences. Does the
precession of Mercury due to observational error? Does it mean
Newtonian celestial mechanics needs some tweaking? Or does it mean a
new theory is needed that has such things as core predictions?)
I'm only railing against believing pancritical rationalism somehow
operates outside of and sits in judgment of the whole of philosophy or
even just the whole of philosophy of science. It does not, especially
since it assumes so much else. (This, over and above, that you need
whole conceptual schemes before pancritical rationalism can even roll up
its sleeves and get to work.)
> I admit I had trouble reading the article above. Would you care to
> explain what I missed? What's wrong with PCR?
See above. Thanks again for reading and responding to my piece.
See also Paul Thagard's work in cognition and philosophy of science. (I
recommend his _Conceptual Revolutions_. I reviewed it several years ago
and my review is online at
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Concept.html )
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html
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