From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 10:14:18 MDT
Lee Corbin wrote:
>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
>
>
>
There is, perhaps, a difference between knowledge and scientific
knowledge. One could, perhaps, agree that if knowledge was not subject
to falsification (in the Popperian sense) then it wasn't scientific.
Now knowledge has been partitioned into two parts, that which we can
test, and that which we can't. If we can't test it, then this still
doesn't mean that it can't be useful. Even falsified theories can be
quite useful. Newton is used to calculate trajectories, because
Einstein is, at least, too much work, and may require information that
isn't available anyway.
OK, so now we have Scientific Knowledge (falsifiable), and Engineering
knowledge (useful). What is left? Sensory impressions, feelings,
pieces that may someday be turned into theories, ... This is what we do
the active thinking about. The sceintific and engineering stuff is
mainly knowledge that we use as tools, not things that we think about.
And most of our interests are on this "not yet fully complete" stuff.
So we use some approach, perhaps Bayesian?. to assemble it into
potential pieces of knowledge, and then we see whether or not it is
useful (scientific knowledge rarely appears without having first been
engineering knowledge, though sometimes the transition is quite quick).
Once we have an idea that appears useful, we share it, and others also
judge it.
Perhaps there are other approaches, but that seems to me to be the basic
one that I use.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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