From: Chris Hibbert (hibbertc@pacbell.net)
Date: Tue Nov 27 2001 - 05:31:20 MST
Afghanistan
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Further to Mike Butler's explanation on PCR. (This is from my web page
on authoritative books,
http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert/books.html.)
The Retreat to Commitment By W. W. Bartley III
Most of the philosophers who wrote about epistemology thought the
questions they were trying to answer was "What do we know?" or
"How do we know anything?". Karl Popper explained that the
important question to address is closer to "How should we decide
what to believe?" His answer was Critical Rationalism, which says
that you subject all your (proposed) answers to criticism, and see
which ones stand up best.
Bartley fixed a bug in Popper's system. Religious people had
responded to Popper by claiming "Everyone has to have faith in
something. You have faith in your Critical Rationalism, I have
faith in the Word of God." Bartley's fix is Pan-Critical
Rationalism. The fix is to subject the Critical Rationalism to
criticism as well. The book has a very long section explaining
what Bartley thinks the best attacks on PCR would be, and then
defending it against them. At the end, he concludes that PCR is
the most effective system he can find for getting better answers
to questions, and that that's the best criteria he's found for
evaluating a way of thinking.
The other question Mike brought up was where the title ("Retreat to
Commitment") came from. The answer is that the first part of the book
gives background for Bartley's discussion of the bug discussed above in
Popper's epistemology. It does so by giving a history of Protestant
(Episcopalian? I don't really remember) thought. As Mike alluded to,
historically, this particular faith believed in questioning the
doctrine, and discussing the implications for theology. Eventually,
that led them into blind alleys where they couldn't justify particular
beliefs, or where they found contradictions. According to Bartley, this
caused them to gradually retreat from their questioning stance to being
just another religion based on commitment to the received
interpretation.
Chris
-- It is easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium. -- Lech Walesa on reverting to a market economy. Chris Hibbert http://discuss.foresight.org/~hibbert chris@pancrit.org
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