From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Aug 01 2002 - 22:28:19 MDT
Technotranscendence writes
> My claim is that propositional knowledge is ultimately
> based on a non-propositional foundation. That foundation...
This urge to seek foundations has three bad effects
1. it greatly increases the amount of bullshit
2. it speaks to math-envy, or attempts to build
on axioms and to strive for Euclidean rigor
3. it is characteristically unevolutionary
By 1, I mean the literally endless propositionalizing, terminological
disputes, and creation of new theories. Now many academics actually
enjoy all this, but at times I think that philosophy is too important
to be left to the academics (unless they, like Daniel Dennett, have a
great deal of common sense).
Now my attack here on intellectualism and overreaching efforts
to put a very fine spin on every argument applies also to some
proponents of PCR too. The most blatant example is the effort
to make any serious distinction between Critical Rationalism and
Pan-Critical Rationalism. It's said that, duh, Popper forgot
that the theory *itself* didn't allow for the possibility of
criticism of itself. My god! Self-reference! How profound.
You can just see the math-envy in the way some people's eyes
light up at the epiphany that Critical Rationalism needed to
become... ta ta! Pan-Critical Rationalism.
Pan-Critical Rationalism (or whatever we want to call it)
rests on the idea of evolutionary epistemology, that we
come to know things by our brains making conjectures about
the nature of the outside world. Indeed, an organism itself
can be viewed as a conjecture, or a guess, made by its genes
in the same way that genetic algorithms operate by making
guesses.
What? What did I say? I said "rests on the...", and so
here too, see, I'm using a foundation! For shame. No,
every argument could be said to be an attempt to justify
some position, or could be said to *depend* on certain
things, but to think of that as a species of foundationism
just shows poor taste IMO about the way that words should be
used.
By 3, I mean that "evolutionary epistemology" can be taken
on two levels: it can mean that our epistemology (we of
the PCR ilk) uses Darwinian reasoning throughout. It also
may be taken to mean that our epistemology itself evolves.
I like both meanings.
It has been said that "evolution explains everything", and
I consider that to be only a slight exaggeration. Evolutionary
epistemology neatly clarifies a lot; for example, the way human
beings learn.
Dan, I hope that I wasn't the one who just wrote some
nasty sarcastic rebuttals back whenever, but reading
over the above, I guess I could have been. Sorry.
Lee
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