Re: Popper, PCR, and Bayesianism (was group based judgment)

From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sat Aug 03 2002 - 11:06:51 MDT


On Friday, August 02, 2002 12:28 AM Lee Corbin lcorbin@tsoft.com wrote:
>> 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.

That's just part of life. Also, pancritical rationalism does not
promise to end that -- or, at least, Popper, Bartley, Campbell, et al.
don't seem to promise that. (If they do, I don't recall reading in
their works where they, so please give me the references or your
interpretation. Even if they do explicitly, I doubt they can deliver.
Since probably the time of Parmenides, if not before, people have been
promising an end to philosophy and even to just to foundational
intellectual disputes. The 20th century seems to have been, in terms of
philosophy -- and pancritical rationalism is a philosophy, so let's not
even get into it being above the fray -- the era of the end of
philosophy philosophies. The endless declaration of the death of
philosophy or of postphilosophy seem a bit exaggerated, pretentious, and
even lacking in perspective, don't you think?) Or do you expect no one
to propositionalize, dispute terminology, and much more importanly
create new theories in the pancritical rationalist universe? I would
expect pancritical rationalism to increase the number of all such, since
the goal is to get people to bash existing theories and ideas more, no?

> 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).

I don't disagree with your non-parenthetic point. (What little I've
read of Dennett does not lead me to believe he's along the right track
here. In fact, IIRC, he's more interested in self-referential arguments
than most other philosophers... which makes it odd you would hold him up
as an example of an okay academic here.) However, the point is not all
that relevant. Some scientists fudge results or are interested in doing
minor work that is little above "clerical studies" with little value --
yet this does not make science, as an endeavor or as a view of the
world, wrong or irrelevant.

> 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.

I agree that it's not much of leap.

> 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.

Ah, look at the assumptions here. First of all, how do you know of an
outside world? How do you know conjectures match against it? Without a
_minimal_ foundation in sense perception, you have nothing for the
conjecture and refutation method to work against. If you already admit
to knowledge of it, _then_ you have a foundation -- granted, a
nonpropositional one, but my argument all along is for a
_nonpropositional_ foundation.

> 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.

Not at all. Instead, let's look for the genetic roots of all ideas --
of all arguments. (By "genetic" here I mean that which gives rise to
them -- not genetics in terms of DNA or anything like that. After all,
DNA, etc. would then have to be taken as foundational -- a position I do
not take.) This is akin to what David Saum calls "Rand's question."
The question is, "What gives rise to this idea?" -- or "What
necessitates it?" (I'm paraphrasing here.) What does this mean? Well,
if I have an idea, such as "X is a Y," I have to have an idea of what an
X is and what a Y is -- at least, some minimal conception. For
instance, if I say "The sky is blue," the statement -- proposition, if
you want to make it formal:) -- is meaningless if I don't know what
"sky" and "blue" are. The statement depends on them having meanings --
however vague or imprecise these might be.

Now, with pancritical rationalism, as I've said in my short article,
pancritical rationalism presupposes a lot of logic and even sense
perception. (If you deny sense perception -- and accepting it to me
does not mean you're a naive realist -- then what does pancritical
rationalism have to work on? At best, merely internal coherence, which
works for theology, but not science or any philosophy worthy of the
name.)

> 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.

I don't disagree that epistemology evolves -- changes. This is both on
the descriptive side and the normative side. On the latter, e.g., even
if humans were rational before Aristotle, he did elucidate better ways
to reason and some of the problems with reasoning. Ditto with the
scientific method and Mill's Methods. These add to the normative
arsenal of epistemology -- as does Popper's falsification.

> It has been said that "evolution explains everything", and
> I consider that to be only a slight exaggeration.

I consider that more than a slight one...:)

Taking the genetic argument above, you need to even explain evolution.
Evolution itself is not primary -- in either the ontological or
epistemological senses of the word. Rather, it's a pretty sophisticated
theory that depends on a lot of antecedent knowledge. Cut it loose from
them and it literally makes no sense. (This is all playing fast and
loose here with the concept of "evolution." After all, evolution is a
fact (or set of seemingly related facts) while particular theories, such
as Darwinism, neoDarwinism, the Neutral Theory (of Motoo Kimura), the
Unified Theory (evolution is entropic, of Brooks and Wiley), etc. are
all attempts to explain the facts. It's the difference between me
saying "The sky is blue" versus me explaining why the sky is blue.:)

> Evolutionary
> epistemology neatly clarifies a lot; for example, the way human
> beings learn.

I'm not so sure about that either, but this would go far afield of my
aim, which is much more modest and not an attempt to demolish
evolutionary theory or falsification, but just to show that pancritical
rationalism too has limits.

Later!

Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
    See my piece on pancritical rationalism at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/PCR.html



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