From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sat Aug 10 2002 - 05:27:54 MDT
On Wednesday, August 07, 2002 12:34 AM Chris Hibbert chris@pancrit.org
wrote:
> I feel like I started this, by responding to Dan's aside
> about an unrebutted
> article he wrote explaining why PCR is insufficient.
I thank you again for reading and responding to my "Comments on
Pancritical Rationalism" (http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/PCR.html).
> I haven't had as much
> time to contribut as I would have liked, but I have been
> following the thread.
That's the same problem I have with following -- much less
participating -- in any thread here. I have to trade between reading
(and participating) and other activities.
> On the whole I agree with Lee (even to the point of expostulating "so
> what?"
> at some of Dan's points. In this message, I'll wade back in, only to
> duck out again and see what happens.
No problem. I've been guilty of the same.
> The main reason to prefer PCR to CR is that it answers some of the
> critics of
> Popper's version, and it fits well with the rest. The point of PCR is
> to say that the epistemology itself is criticizable.
I don't think, before Bartley, epistemology was off limits to criticism.
Criticizing epistemology, in fact, has been going on since Plato's
time.:) Pancritical rationalists didn't invent that.
> If you think that's true of
> Critical Rationalism (as Popper didn't), then I'm willing to call it
> critical rationalism when talking to you.
It's a minor point. I just responded to it because Lee brought it up.
It isn't even mentioned in my article.
> Likewise, I'm willing to pose as either an
> agnostic or an atheist, depending on which one my interlocutor defines
> as lacking certainty.
That's another discussion. However, if you accept the definition of
"atheist" as "one who lacks a believe in God or gods," then it's a
binary thing. Either you or you aren't not an atheist. Agnosticism
refers how or whether one knows. As George H. Smith put it (in his
_Atheism: The Case Against God_) and I roughly interpret it, one can be
an agnostic atheist or an agnostic theist, but one can't be neither an
atheist nor a theist -- despite that people use "agnostic" as a third
way. (In fact, most agnostics I know are really atheists who don't want
to endlessly debate religion with theists. This is understandable. I'm
an atheist, too, who doesn't want to spend my time repeating the same
arguments over and over to my theist friends.) I.e., atheism is a
matter of belief, agnosticism is a matter of why one believes. Thus
they aren't mutually exclusive.
>> Then you implicitly accept my foundation of sense perception.:)
>
> You keep coming back to this.
Yeah, strange isn't that. I keep having to bring up my main point again
and again.:)
> It apparently seems to you as some kind
> of foundation for reasoning.
Not just reasoning. All knowledge.
> I think of perception as a conduit, like language.
> There are some things I can figure out without language, but most of
> my
> reasoning is done using language. I make use of perception and
> language,
> realizing that they are imperfect tools. There are results one can
> reach with
> impeccable use of language, and experiments one can witness directly
> that give
> wrong answers.
On the latter, such as?
> You have to use the rest of your bag of tricks to
> evaluate
> them and decide what's correct. Perception isn't foundational, it's
> just the main way I interact with the world.
What are the other ways you interact with the world?
>> most evolutionary epistemologists and pancritical
>> rationalists are representationalists. This means [they] accept a
>> radical
>> split between the mind and reality
>
> The mind is part of reality.
I don't disagree.
> Dennett starts to provide an explanation for how
> consciousness can be built on non-conscious meat.
One can still be a representationalist and a materialist. The two are
not mutually exclusive. Representationalism, in fact, has been held far
and wide in Western philosophy since Descartes' time (sixteenth
century).
>> I was _not_ presenting it as an argument against pancritical
>> rationalism, but as one of its shakey presumptions. (I don't mean an
>> essential one, but ditching it would involve either becoming a
>> complete
>> skeptic or embracing some form of perceptual realism. If the latter,
>> we're back to foundationalism.)
>
> You lost me here. I don't accept the "radical split" as essential to
> PCR.
I'm happy to hear this.
> If
> you think I must in order to be consistent, please explain why.
No! Actually, I'd rather you abandon such a dualism from the start.
> (And polling
> authors of works on PCR isn't convincing.)
Not at all. I was merely working from Popper's and Bartley's reasoning
here. Popper, e.g., uses conjecture and refutation because induction,
he claims, does not work. Since induction doesn't work, they needed
another method to keep science from becoming theology. (Or, in
Bartley's case, to keep theology from becoming theology, since one major
area of concern for him was theology.:) If one does not accept the
representalist view of the mind, then a lot of pancritical rationality
does not follow. (Yeah, the method of falsification can still be valid,
but it no longer becomes the workhorse of epistemology.)
Now, to be fair, perhaps their reasoning is faulty, but you'll have to
show me how to get pancritical rationalism without a representationalist
view of mind.
> Do you argue that I have to choose one of those alternatives if I
> reject the
> split between mind and reality? Maybe what you mean by "a complete
> skeptic"
> bears some resemblance to being pan-critical?
No again on the first question here. A radical split is usually what
leads to skepticism and I'm asking you don't accept such a split.
>> If you don't accept
>> this representational view of the mind, then there's no reason to
>> find
>> substitutes for observation and inductions based on observation.
>> (This
>> does not entirely clear up the matter of induction, that it does
>> remove a major obstacle in its path.
>
> I don't know whether you're charging me with an additional burden here
> or relieving me of one.
It depends on where you stand. If you accept Popper's and Bartley's
belief in representationalism and, thereby, their arguments against
induction, then you have the burden of linking the mind to reality with
those obstacles in place. If not, then you at least have those
obstacles removed.
>> Sense perception is pretty easy. There's nothing underneath it. It
>> just is. Existence exists, as Rand put it. There ain't nothing
>> else.
>> Sense perception is nonpropositional, so it can't be analyzed into
>> further concepts or propositions. It's the foundation.
>
> In order to understand perception, we study it's strengths and
> weaknesses.
I don't disagree.
> The reason that optical (and other) illusions get big play at places
> like the
> Exploratorium isn't just that they're fun, but also because they
> illuminate
> the use of one of our major tools for understanding the world.
I agree, but how do you learn of, e.g., optical illusions? By trying to
integrate perceptions. For instance, the straight stick in a glass of
water looks bent, but how do you know it's straight? Because you've
looked at it out of the water (or felt it in the water and did not feel
a bend). If you don't accept sense perception here, then you could
never know of such illusions. If you do, then the task is to explain
them and the explanation lies in learning more about the world through
more observations and experiments. Grounding all these is, again, sense
perception.
See my other posts on this matter from last night as well as the Kelley
book I review at
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Percept.html
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
See my review of Paul Thagard's _Conceptual Revolutions_ at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Concept.html
See "A Dialogue On Happiness" at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/Dialogue.html
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