Epistemology For Beginners (long)
Ananda Gupta
The purpose of this essay is to outline the basic issues in epistemology,
which is the study of knowledge. Epistemological questions include
questions such as "Is there such thing as knowledge?", "If there is
knowledge, how do we acquire it?", and others. I believe this is on topic
because many of the postings in talk.origins have to do with science, and
epistemology is prior to science - after all, for science to be worthwhile,
it has to at least contribute to human knowledge, and problems about human
knowledge therefore go to the heart of this newsgroup's topic.
I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical definition is:
"Justified, true belief". I say crude because this definition can be, and
has been, improved upon. Now we have a three-word definition of knowledge.
First let's start with "belief". What's a belief? A belief is a
proposition that a person accepts as true. It is possible to have false
beliefs; for example, if I believe that I am Napoleon Bonaparte, that would
be a false belief (even though I think it's true). It would be absurd if
someone were to say that he believes something yet knows that belief to be
false, e.g. "It is raining outside, but I don't believe that it is raining
outside." That is not a formal contradiction, but it is a very odd thing
to say.
Now for "true". What is it for a proposition to be true? Aristotle put it
most simply: "To say of what is, that it is not, and of what is not, that
it is, is false, while to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not,
that it is not, is true." That is, a true proposition agrees with the
facts of reality it describes, and a false proposition does not.
And now for "justified", the most controversial of the three parts of the
definition of knowledge. What is it for a proposition to be justified?
Suppose I were to say that I believe it is raining outside. What might
justify that proposition? One way to justify it would be to base it on
another proposition: "When I opened the window, I saw drops of water
falling from the sky and people walking around with umbrellas." So, a
proposition can be justified based on another proposition, provided the
latter provides some sort of reason for believing the former. If I were to
justify my belief that it is raining outside by saying, "Well, I flipped a
coin, having decided that if it came up heads it would be raining outside
and if it came up tails, it would not be raining," that doesn't seem to be
a very good justification. It doesn't provide a reason for believing the
initial proposition, that it is raining outside. Note that the issue of
justification and the issue of truth are separate: suppose I did in fact
flip a coin, and it came up heads, and I therefore adopted the belief that
it was raining outside. And suppose it actually was raining outside. Then
my belief that it was raining outside is true, but not justified, and hence
does not count as knowledge.
II. THE SKEPTIC
First a distinction. A "skeptic", in common parlance, is a person who
questions what he sees and reads, who demands evidence for assertions he
finds implausible, and who thinks carefully before accepting new ideas. In
epistemology, a skeptic is one who believes that people cannot know
anything at all. I will be using the word "skeptic" in the technical, that
is to say the latter, sense.
For the skeptic to deny the existence of knowledge, using the definition of
knowledge given above, he must deny that any beliefs fit that definition.
That is, he must show that no beliefs are both true and justified. It is
difficult for him to show that no beliefs are true; certainly he thinks his
own belief that there is no such thing as knowledge is true, so he runs
into a logical problem if he denies that. (Moreover, since the negation of
a true belief is still a belief, if the skeptic were to show that all
beliefs are false, he'd have shown that all their negations are true.)
Therefore the traditional skeptic questions that any beliefs are in fact
justified. Typically this takes the form of an infinite regress argument.
In dialogue, here is how it goes. A is a non-skeptic; S is the skeptic.
A: I believe that X.
S: What's your reason for believing X?
A: I also believe Y, and Y provides reason for believing X.
S: Oh. Okay, what's your reason for believing Y?
A: I also believe Z, and Z provides a reason to believe Y.
S: Okay, what's your reason for believing Z?
.... ad infinitum.
You can see that this is a problem because X is justified because of Y, and
Y is justified because of Z, and so forth, yet the chain of justification
never ends. Unfortunately for the non-skeptic, humans have vast but
nonetheless limited brainpower, and no one can hold an infinite number of
beliefs. Therefore, if each person has a finite number of beliefs, yet
justification for any belief requires an infinite sequence of other
beliefs, then no person has any justified beliefs. And since only
justified beliefs count as knowledge, then no person has any knowledge.
The philosopher Michael Huemer (whose specialty is in this area,
incidentally; his home page is home.sprynet.com/~owl1) states the problem
very succinctly, thus:
1. In order to be justified in believing that P, one must have a reason for
it.
2. That reason must also be justified.
3. There can't be an infinite regress of justification for P.
4. P can't be justified by circular reasoning.
5. People have justified beliefs.
These propositions all seem plausible, but they cannot all be true (they
are "jointly inconsistent", as Huemer puts it). Therefore one must be
rejected for one's theory of knowledge to be consistent.
Skeptics solve the inconsistency by rejecting #5, as explained above. A
school of thought called "coherentism" rejects #4, claiming that some, not
all, kinds of circular reasoning do in fact count as justification. A
third school of thought, "foundationalism", rejects #1 (for some, not all,
instances of P).
I am not going to go into the merits of these solutions here - all have
their critics.
III. TALK.ORIGINS
The debate between creationism and evolutionary theory is a scientific one,
although questions of what counts as science often crop up. The preceding
essay may have more to do with the debate between atheism and theism, which
bears certain similarities to the creation/evolution dispute. In
particular, both disputes often involve appeals to evidence as
justification for belief in a god, or for acceptance of a particular
scientific theory. What epistemology points out is that, unless one is
careful to establish exactly what is required for a belief to be justified,
appeals to evidence can lead one to skepticism, and of course skepticism
would entail that people are justified in believing neither creationism nor
evolutionary theory. And that, in turn, may lead to a simple yet
unattractive argument:
1. Either (some form of) creationism is true or (some form of) evolutionary
theory is true.
2. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then skepticism is true.
3. Skepticism is false.
4. Therefore, (that form of) evolutionary theory is false.
5. Therefore, creationism is true.
The tricky premise is of course #2 (#1 has its problems as well, but I've
tried to state it as generally as possible to encompass all possibilities
except some weird hybrid theory). One might argue for #2 as follows:
a. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then all beliefs can be
justified only by appeal to evidence supporting them.
b. That evidence must also be justified by appeal to further evidence.
c. There can't be an infinite regress of evidence.
d. Nor can there be circular justifications involving evidence.
e. Therefore, if (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, no beliefs are
justified.
f. Skepticism = the view that no beliefs are justified.
2. Therefore, if (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then
skepticism is true.
That, in a nutshell, is what I see as the relevance of epistemology to what
we are talking about in this newsgroup. Obviously this is not a philosophy
newsgroup, but I think it is important to be clear about those views one
holds (implicitly or not) that are prior to science, because they have a
way of trickling in and leaving a stain.
John Wilkins
Damn.
Some picky little quibbles to maintain my self-respect :-)
Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>
> The purpose of this essay is to outline the basic issues in epistemology,
> which is the study of knowledge. Epistemological questions include
> questions such as "Is there such thing as knowledge?", "If there is
> knowledge, how do we acquire it?", and others. I believe this is on topic
> because many of the postings in talk.origins have to do with science, and
> epistemology is prior to science - after all, for science to be worthwhile,
> it has to at least contribute to human knowledge, and problems about human
> knowledge therefore go to the heart of this newsgroup's topic.
I do not think that epistemology *precedes* science. I believe that
epistemology is the "rational reconstruction" of knowledge gathering
activities, and is post hoc.
>
> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
>
> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical definition is:
> "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this definition can be, and
> has been, improved upon. Now we have a three-word definition of knowledge.
The JTB definition is - IMO - inadequate (you are surely familiar with
the Gettier counterexamples). But a more sophisticated way to define
knowledge is hard to come by. For myself, I think that knowledge is a
class of beliefs on which we base our behaviours. This is a pragmatist
account, and I know you do not want to interfere with the clear logic of
the subsequent argument with such complication. Perhaps a qualifying
paragraph at the end of this and the next section.
Very nicely done.
--
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
Bob Pease
"Ananda Gupta" <a...@verizon.net> wrote in message
news:Xns92FFA64...@199.45.49.11...
> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
Mc Snip
>. What epistemology points out is that, unless one is
> careful to establish exactly what is required for a belief to be
justified,
> appeals to evidence can lead one to skepticism, and of course skepticism
> would entail that people are justified in believing neither creationism
nor
> evolutionary theory. And that, in turn, may lead to a simple yet
> unattractive argument:
I can't tell if the following is presented seriously or not, but even using
the author's definitions of "Skeptic" , the Logic goes haywire rather
rapidly.
> 1. Either (some form of) creationism is true or (some form of)
evolutionary
> theory is true.
Possible excluded middle, depending on how tight the definitions of
Creationism and Evolution are.
> 2. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then skepticism is true.
Non seq.
> 3. Skepticism is false.
Fiat
> 4. Therefore, (that form of) evolutionary theory is false.
Not valid because it is the contrapositive of an unestablished conjecture
> 5. Therefore, creationism is true.
See objection to #1.
>
> The tricky premise is of course #2 (#1 has its problems as well, but I've
> tried to state it as generally as possible to encompass all possibilities
> except some weird hybrid theory). One might argue for #2 as follows:
> a. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then all beliefs can be
> justified only by appeal to evidence supporting them.
why?
> b. That evidence must also be justified by appeal to further evidence.
so what?
> c. There can't be an infinite regress of evidence.
Why not? this is a statement of the "First Cause" idea.
> d. Nor can there be circular justifications involving evidence.
OK
> e. Therefore, if (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, no beliefs
are
> justified.
How is this established?
> f. Skepticism = the view that no beliefs are justified.
by definition
> 2. Therefore, if (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then
> skepticism is true.
follows from "e"
> That, in a nutshell, is what I see as the relevance of epistemology to
what
> we are talking about in this newsgroup. Obviously this is not a
philosophy
> newsgroup, but I think it is important to be clear about those views one
> holds (implicitly or not) that are prior to science, because they have a
> way of trickling in and leaving a stain.
Would that life were this simple!!
RJ Pease
dkomo
>
> Now for "true". What is it for a proposition to be true? Aristotle put it
> most simply: "To say of what is, that it is not, and of what is not, that
> it is, is false, while to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not,
> that it is not, is true." That is, a true proposition agrees with the
> facts of reality it describes, and a false proposition does not.
>
<Groan> Bivalent logic again. Is it possible for a proposition to be
95% true and 5% false, or does it *have* to be 100% true to be
"true"? Can it be only 50% true and 50% false and still make sense?
Why is it a good thing to use a logical calculus that is over 2000
years old? This is now the 21st century. Why aren't we making more
use of multivalent logic? Why not paradoxical logic (popular in the
East)? If nothing else, shifting to these paradigms might make us
realize that we really don't know what we're talking (thinking) about,
even if we're convinced that we do. Reducing a real world that
contains continuous shades of gray to discrete zones of black and
white may be illusory epistemology.
Finally, in the quote from Aristotle above, somebody better define
what "is" is.
John Wilkins
> "Ananda Gupta" <a...@verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:Xns92FFA64...@199.45.49.11...
> > EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>
> Mc Snip
>
> >. What epistemology points out is that, unless one is
> > careful to establish exactly what is required for a belief to be
> justified,
> > appeals to evidence can lead one to skepticism, and of course skepticism
> > would entail that people are justified in believing neither creationism
> nor
> > evolutionary theory. And that, in turn, may lead to a simple yet
> > unattractive argument:
>
> I can't tell if the following is presented seriously or not, but even using
> the author's definitions of "Skeptic" , the Logic goes haywire rather
> rapidly.
>
>
> > 1. Either (some form of) creationism is true or (some form of)
> evolutionary
> > theory is true.
>
> Possible excluded middle, depending on how tight the definitions of
> Creationism and Evolution are.
He said this, Bob. It's called "granting for the sake of argument"...
You even quote him saying it.
Ananda is not arguing in favour of these arguments; he's trying to
explicate the logic involved in them so that they can be considered
openly. A large part of the problem with creationists (and indeed with
philosophy in general) is that (to quote Moore, who I am just rereading
and finding all kinds of nice quotes) "...history is full [of] ... the
attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely _what_
question it is which you desire to answer".
Ananda Gupta
<1fom7vq.1m18vhxcekflgN%john.w...@bigpond.com>:
>This should be an FAQ. I should be able to write this sort of thing.
>Damn.
I originally tried to write it as a FAQ but discovered that I spent more
time explaining the questions than with the answers :). And, of course,
part of the reason behind it is precisely that such questions are not asked
frequently enough. heh
>Some picky little quibbles to maintain my self-respect :-)
Of course. It's a matter of good manners :)
>Ananda Gupta <a...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>>
>> The purpose of this essay is to outline the basic issues in
>> epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Epistemological
>> questions include questions such as "Is there such thing as
>> knowledge?", "If there is knowledge, how do we acquire it?", and
>> others. I believe this is on topic because many of the postings in
>> talk.origins have to do with science, and epistemology is prior to
>> science - after all, for science to be worthwhile, it has to at least
>> contribute to human knowledge, and problems about human knowledge
>> therefore go to the heart of this newsgroup's topic.
>
>I do not think that epistemology *precedes* science. I believe that
>epistemology is the "rational reconstruction" of knowledge gathering
>activities, and is post hoc.
Fair enough, although a skeptic would say that such reconstruction is
doomed to failure, and said failure has real consequences about how we
ought to do science once we've recognized epistemology as a failure.
>> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
>>
>> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical
>> definition is: "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this
>> definition can be, and has been, improved upon. Now we have a
>> three-word definition of knowledge.
>
>The JTB definition is - IMO - inadequate (you are surely familiar with
>the Gettier counterexamples).
Surely. :)
> But a more sophisticated way to define
>knowledge is hard to come by. For myself, I think that knowledge is a
>class of beliefs on which we base our behaviours. This is a pragmatist
>account, and I know you do not want to interfere with the clear logic of
>the subsequent argument with such complication. Perhaps a qualifying
>paragraph at the end of this and the next section.
I may just put in an appendix of "for further reading" with a couple of
sentences about each title. I'm not especially familiar with pragmatism
but you get the idea.
>Very nicely done.
Thanks.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<avnka4$o...@dispatch.concentric.net>:
>I can't tell if the following is presented seriously or not, but even
>using the author's definitions of "Skeptic" , the Logic goes haywire
>rather rapidly.
Nah. You can take issue with some of the premises, of course, but the
argument is logically valid.
>> 1. Either (some form of) creationism is true or (some form of)
>> evolutionary theory is true.
>
>Possible excluded middle, depending on how tight the definitions of
>Creationism and Evolution are.
Right, which is why I qualified it by saying these are intended to be very
very broad categories.
>> 2. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then skepticism is
>> true.
>
>Non seq.
Non sequitur means "does not follow". Note the absence of the word
"therefore" in (2); this should have been a signal that I was not asserting
that (2) follows from (1). Therefore, the fact that it does not follow is
irrelevant.
>> 3. Skepticism is false.
>
>Fiat
The point of the argument, which I thought was clear, was that if (1) and
(2) are true you have to CHOOSE between skepticism and creationism. If you
are comfortable choosing skepticism, then fine, but of course you're
saddled with, well, being a skeptic (since now you don't think anything at
all, including evolutionary theory, counts as knowledge). The argument is
aimed at people who DO think there is knowledge. If you deny that there is
knowledge, then you will of course disagree with the argument's conclusion
(because you will be committed to saying that we cannot be justified in
saying creationism is false).
>> 4. Therefore, (that form of) evolutionary theory is false.
>
>Not valid because it is the contrapositive of an unestablished
>conjecture
Premises aren't valid or invalid, arguments are. Moreover, if you were
talking about the *inference* from 2 & 3 to 4, it's a valid inference,
because it's modus tollens:
1. A -> B
2. -B
3. Therefore, -A
The argument above is valid (as are all arguments fitting its schema). It
may not be sound (some of its premises may be false). Validity and
soundness are separate concepts. Arguments can be valid and unsound, or
invalid and sound, or invalid and unsound, or valid and sound. This is all
covered in the first week of an introductory logic class.
>> 5. Therefore, creationism is true.
>
>See objection to #1.
>
>>
>> The tricky premise is of course #2 (#1 has its problems as well, but
>> I've tried to state it as generally as possible to encompass all
>> possibilities except some weird hybrid theory). One might argue for
>> #2 as follows:
>
>
>> a. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then all beliefs can
>> be justified only by appeal to evidence supporting them.
>
>why?
Again, the argument is aimed at people who *already believe* (a). If you
don't believe (a), then you don't have to believe (2) in the argument
above, and hence you are not committed to accepting its conclusion. If you
DO believe (a), then you are committed to believe (2) above, and then you
are committed to accepting its conclusion.
>> b. That evidence must also be justified by appeal to further evidence.
>> so what? c. There can't be an infinite regress of evidence.
>
>Why not? this is a statement of the "First Cause" idea.
Did you even read the essay? You can't have an infinite regress of
evidence because that would require us to believe an infinite number of
propositions, and our brains are finite. Hence we cannot believe an
infinite number of propositions, and hence we cannot appeal to an infinite
regress of evidence to justify any of our beliefs.
>> d. Nor can there be circular justifications involving evidence.
>
>OK
>> e. Therefore, if (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, no
>> beliefs are justified.
>
>How is this established?
Go read the essay again.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
>Ananda Gupta wrote:
><Groan> Bivalent logic again. Is it possible for a proposition to be
>95% true and 5% false, or does it *have* to be 100% true to be
>"true"? Can it be only 50% true and 50% false and still make sense?
>Why is it a good thing to use a logical calculus that is over 2000
>years old? This is now the 21st century. Why aren't we making more
>use of multivalent logic? Why not paradoxical logic (popular in the
>East)? If nothing else, shifting to these paradigms might make us
>realize that we really don't know what we're talking (thinking) about,
>even if we're convinced that we do. Reducing a real world that
>contains continuous shades of gray to discrete zones of black and
>white may be illusory epistemology.
All very interesting (well, not really -- or maybe it is interesting and
not at the same time... paradoxical logic! I love it!). What do you think
the implications of what you say above would be for the creation/evolution
debate?
ASG
dkomo
Ananda Gupta
>Ananda is not arguing in favour of these arguments; he's trying to
>explicate the logic involved in them so that they can be considered
>openly.
Thanks (shudder).
> A large part of the problem with creationists (and indeed with
>philosophy in general) is that (to quote Moore, who I am just rereading
>and finding all kinds of nice quotes) "...history is full [of] ... the
>attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely _what_
>question it is which you desire to answer".
Moore is more quotable than he gets credit for. And, in fact, there's a
great paper (also by Mike Huemer) taking that quote (actually, the Douglas
Adams popularization thereof) and developing a pretty sharp critique of a
particular philosophical method. Here's the link if you want to read it --
it's short:
dkomo
>
> dkomo <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote in <3E1F68D7...@cris.com>:
>
> >Ananda Gupta wrote:
>
> ><Groan> Bivalent logic again. Is it possible for a proposition to be
> >95% true and 5% false, or does it *have* to be 100% true to be
> >"true"? Can it be only 50% true and 50% false and still make sense?
> >Why is it a good thing to use a logical calculus that is over 2000
> >years old? This is now the 21st century. Why aren't we making more
> >use of multivalent logic? Why not paradoxical logic (popular in the
> >East)? If nothing else, shifting to these paradigms might make us
> >realize that we really don't know what we're talking (thinking) about,
> >even if we're convinced that we do. Reducing a real world that
> >contains continuous shades of gray to discrete zones of black and
> >white may be illusory epistemology.
>
> All very interesting (well, not really -- or maybe it is interesting and
> not at the same time... paradoxical logic! I love it!).
"The key to the truth lies in paradox.
Is the world real or unreal? Is your life-pattern predetermined or do
you have free choice?
Religious thinkers of Europe and West Asia agree that the world is
real, and that human beings have free choice. But as they are trained
in the "either-or" logic many of them look to the East for a fight
over these two related questions. So these thinkers insist in their
ideas that the Chinese religion is preaching that the world is an
illusion - Maya, and that fate rather than free will govern human life
- karma.
Having convinced themselves and others that this is the common failing
of the oriental belief, they go on to argue that this religious belief
is pessimistic in their rejection of free will - and therefore is
useless as a guide for mankind.
But what the Chinese ethos actually teach is that the world is both
real and unreal; it is real at one level of experience and unreal at
another level of experience.
Human life is fated as well as governed by free choice; life is
predetermined in one dimension of living, and governed by free will in
another dimension of living.
In the revelation of the Tao Te Ching, the world is said to be solid
on the surface and hollow in the depths."
> What do you think
> the implications of what you say above would be for the creation/evolution
> debate?
>
I'll have to think on this some more.
> ASG
Ananda Gupta
>Forgot to include these links:
>
>
>http://buffy.eecs.berkeley.edu/IRO/Summary/03abstracts/zadeh.14.html
Zadeh's argument, as presented in that brief, would be much stronger if he
gave an example that did not depend on the indeterminacy of physical
instances of mathematical concepts.
>http://www.fmag.unict.it/PolPhil/Lukas/LukasKey2.html
The central claim in this link appears to be:
"All sentences about future facts which are not yet decided belong to this
category. Such sentences are neither true at present moment, for they have
no real correlate."
Leaving aside some of the terminology (which actually seems to me to have
some crippling problems), the author here appears to be arguing for a third
truth-value, "possibility". That is, any given proposition is true, false,
or possible. I don't see what advantages this approach has over the
standard modal approach (where possibility and necessity are *operators*
with variable scope over propositions).
>http://www.aymara.org/biblio/igr/igr3.html
This link was very interesting, marred only by quite a few typos that
caused a lot of confusion. I gathered that it was translated.
>http://www.developer.com/open/print.php/1024601
Oh, boy, here we go with the "I know how to program, therefore I am
intimately familiar with the entire history of Western philosophy."
Seriously, the little blurb on multivalent logic makes absolutely no sense.
Multivalent logic allows for logic values between 0 and 1, fine, but is
that the entirety of the value? That is, are .4 and .8 different values,
or is there just one "in-between" value that comprises the entire middle?
If the former, then how do we know what point on the spectrum between 0 and
1 to assign to "Z is very, very beautiful"? If the latter, then how do we
avoid the counterintuitive implication that "Z is not very beautiful" and
"Z is very beautiful" have the same truth-value?
>http://www.simplecodeworks.com/KSCO/book/chapter3.htm
This is also very interesting, but among other things I don't see how the
first example, with tall men, escapes the problem it is trying to solve.
It says that the description of Ed, who is 6-3, as "a tall man" has a
truth-value of .9, therefore giving Ed a "90 percent membership in the set
of tall men". How was this figure arrived at? Why not 80 percent?
Anyway, I apologize for my earlier snide remark. It seems to me that while
the sorites paradox is compelling, this approach is not necessarily the
best way to answer it. One question that someone else asks is whether it
avoids problems of higher order vagueness -- that is, whether it just
pushes the sorites paradox to another level. That is, suppose you have a
fuzzy set, along the lines of the diagram in that last link. How is it
decided where the set becomes fuzzy? Is there a higher order fuzziness
that determines where, exactly, it becomes necessary to move from a truth
value of 1.0 to a value of .999?
ASG
Brian L
Gupta) wrote:
>First let's start with "belief". What's a belief? A belief is a
>proposition that a person accepts as true. It is possible to have false
>beliefs; for example, if I believe that I am Napoleon Bonaparte, that would
>be a false belief (even though I think it's true). It would be absurd if
>someone were to say that he believes something yet knows that belief to be
>false, e.g. "It is raining outside, but I don't believe that it is raining
>outside." That is not a formal contradiction, but it is a very odd thing
>to say.
It was raining when you came in a few minutes ago. The forecast
called for rain all day. Do you believe it is raining?
Ananda Gupta
<ug6v1v8a0pceeqkfg...@4ax.com>:
In that case I have a prima facie justification for my belief that it is
still raining. Whether prima facie justification is "real" justification
is the subject of much debate.
ASG
dkomo
The modern way to say it is "I believe there is a n% chance that it is
still raining", where, I hate to say it, the n (between 0 and 1) is
assigned on the basis of the person's experience and judgement.
Now, at least, the uncertainty in the belief is plainly in the open
and approximately quantified. And there's no need to debate abstract
questions about whether the justification for the belief is "real" or
"prima facie."
Further, if a hundred people make a similar assessment of their belief
that it is still raining, it would be possible to arrive at a more
accurate probability of it being true by using statistical theory.
eyelessgame
> Ananda Gupta wrote:
> >
> > Brian L <n...@spam.plz> wrote in
> > <ug6v1v8a0pceeqkfg...@4ax.com>:
> >
> > >On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:16:12 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
> > >Gupta) wrote:
>
> > >It was raining when you came in a few minutes ago. The forecast
> > >called for rain all day. Do you believe it is raining?
> >
> > In that case I have a prima facie justification for my belief that it is
> > still raining. Whether prima facie justification is "real" justification
> > is the subject of much debate.
> >
> > ASG
>
> The modern way to say it is "I believe there is a n% chance that it is
> still raining", where, I hate to say it, the n (between 0 and 1) is
> assigned on the basis of the person's experience and judgement.
>
> Now, at least, the uncertainty in the belief is plainly in the open
> and approximately quantified. And there's no need to debate abstract
> questions about whether the justification for the belief is "real" or
> "prima facie."
"belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
That's what science is, and why it works, and what the philosophers of
2000 years ago had no clue about. Propositions that are supported by
more evidence are more likely to be true.
Evolution, like gravity and heliocentrism, is very very likely true
*because of the evidence supporting it*. Any epistimology that cannot
deal with that formulation is basically playing with itself.
> Further, if a hundred people make a similar assessment of their belief
> that it is still raining, it would be possible to arrive at a more
> accurate probability of it being true by using statistical theory.
I break with you here -- 80% or more of the world disagrees with your
religious beliefs, whatever they are (including if you don't have
any). At some point in the past the number was at or near 100%. Does
that make your beliefs unlikely to be true? You must factor in the
quality of the evidence, not just the quantity of opinions.
>
> --dk...@cris.com
Ananda Gupta
<e707421e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
>"belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
>try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
>evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
>supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
sigh.
(a) you imply a range of... what? credibility? between "belief" and
"proof", but there's no reason to think there is such a range;
(b) the essay was about what counts as knowledge. In this context it
doesn't matter whether your beliefs are supported by evidence; what matters
is *why* evidential support means anything at all. See the skeptic's
argument in the essay for some reasons why evidential support may not
entail anything.
>That's what science is, and why it works, and what the philosophers of
>2000 years ago had no clue about. Propositions that are supported by
>more evidence are more likely to be true.
>
>Evolution, like gravity and heliocentrism, is very very likely true
>*because of the evidence supporting it*.
Pure assertion. Again, the skeptic will argue that the evidence doesn't
matter unless there is further evidence supporting it, and so forth ad
infinitum.
>Any epistimology that cannot
>deal with that formulation is basically playing with itself.
Any scientific approach that is confused about what counts as knowledge is
certainly playing with itself.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
>Ananda Gupta wrote:
>>
>> Brian L <n...@spam.plz> wrote in
>> <ug6v1v8a0pceeqkfg...@4ax.com>:
>>
>>> On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:16:12 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
>>> Gupta) wrote:
>>
>>> It was raining when you came in a few minutes ago. The forecast
>>> called for rain all day. Do you believe it is raining?
>>
>> In that case I have a prima facie justification for my belief that it
>> is still raining. Whether prima facie justification is "real"
>> justification is the subject of much debate.
>>
>> ASG
>
>The modern way to say it is "I believe there is a n% chance that it is
>still raining", where, I hate to say it, the n (between 0 and 1) is
>assigned on the basis of the person's experience and judgement.
>
>Now, at least, the uncertainty in the belief is plainly in the open
>and approximately quantified. And there's no need to debate abstract
>questions about whether the justification for the belief is "real" or
>"prima facie."
The uncertainty is plain enough in my original statement; the fact that
one's belief is not conclusive. What's not clear about that?
Sure there is. What if 'n' is very close to 1? Does that mean the belief
is knowledge? What about if 'n' is closer to .5? And so forth.
ASG
Brian M. Scott
Gupta) wrote:
>dkomo <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote in <3E202561...@cris.com>:
>>Ananda Gupta wrote:
>>> Brian L <n...@spam.plz> wrote in
>>> <ug6v1v8a0pceeqkfg...@4ax.com>:
>>>> On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:16:12 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
>>>> Gupta) wrote:
>>>> It was raining when you came in a few minutes ago. The forecast
>>>> called for rain all day. Do you believe it is raining?
>>> In that case I have a prima facie justification for my belief that it
>>> is still raining. Whether prima facie justification is "real"
>>> justification is the subject of much debate.
>>The modern way to say it is "I believe there is a n% chance that it is
>>still raining", where, I hate to say it, the n (between 0 and 1) is
>>assigned on the basis of the person's experience and judgement.
>>Now, at least, the uncertainty in the belief is plainly in the open
>>and approximately quantified. And there's no need to debate abstract
>>questions about whether the justification for the belief is "real" or
>>"prima facie."
>The uncertainty is plain enough in my original statement; the fact that
>one's belief is not conclusive. What's not clear about that?
>Sure there is. What if 'n' is very close to 1? Does that mean the belief
>is knowledge? What about if 'n' is closer to .5? And so forth.
I don't buy the idea that one can generally assign a useful
subjective numerical probability, but I also don't see that as
the real point. The problem is treating knowledge as if it were
a crisp set, so to speak. It isn't, so trying to define a sharp
boundary for it is pointless.
Brian
Brian M. Scott
Gupta) wrote:
>aa...@oro.net (eyelessgame) wrote in
><e707421e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>>Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
>>"belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
>>try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
>>evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
>>supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
>sigh.
>(a) you imply a range of... what? credibility? between "belief" and
>"proof", but there's no reason to think there is such a range;
That's a rather extraordinary statement. Would you care to try
to justify it?
>(b) the essay was about what counts as knowledge. In this context it
>doesn't matter whether your beliefs are supported by evidence; what matters
>is *why* evidential support means anything at all. See the skeptic's
>argument in the essay for some reasons why evidential support may not
>entail anything.
Since experience broadly confirms the value of evidential
support, that strikes me as a pretty wrong-headed way to look at
the argument. It seems preferable to view it as an argument
against trying to isolate knowledge as a well-defined subset of
belief. While I'm perfectly happy to use 'knowledge' in an
informal sense in the real world -- it's a useful term even if it
*can't* be defined exactly -- in very careful usage I would say
that there are simply more and less well justified beliefs.
[...]
Brian
eyelessgame
> aa...@oro.net (eyelessgame) wrote in
> <e707421e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>
> >Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
> >"belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
> >try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
> >evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
> >supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
>
> sigh.
>
> (a) you imply a range of... what? credibility? between "belief" and
> "proof", but there's no reason to think there is such a range;
If you can't think of a hundred thousand real examples trivially, you
live in a different reality than I do. It is more likely that my car
is parked in my garage right now than it is that my wife is having an
affair with a six-month-old billy goat named Hubert, just to pick one
example.
> (b) the essay was about what counts as knowledge.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it
means.
> In this context it
> doesn't matter whether your beliefs are supported by evidence; what matters
> is *why* evidential support means anything at all.
Occam's razor, that's why.
In more words: it *just so happens* that the universe we happen to be
in has fairly simple rules that govern wide ranges of phenomena,
meaning that wide ranges of phenomena turn out to be predictable by
inference -- drop 999 hammers, watch them all fall, and confidently
predict that hammer 1000 will also fall when you drop it.
Inference works. It doesn't in principle *have* to be this way, but it
turns out that it *is* this way.
> See the skeptic's
> argument in the essay for some reasons why evidential support may not
> entail anything.
Except that greater evidentiary support, *in practice*, makes
propositions more likely to be true. And I will gladly win money off
anyone who disagrees.
> >That's what science is, and why it works, and what the philosophers of
> >2000 years ago had no clue about. Propositions that are supported by
> >more evidence are more likely to be true.
> >
> >Evolution, like gravity and heliocentrism, is very very likely true
> >*because of the evidence supporting it*.
>
> Pure assertion.
Which? "Evolution, gravity and heliocentrism are very very likely
true" or "...are very very likely true because of the evidence
supporting them"? Did you wish to disagree with either or both?
> Again, the skeptic will argue that the evidence doesn't
> matter unless there is further evidence supporting it, and so forth ad
> infinitum.
Except that at some point you shit or get off the pot. The real world
provides us with data. We can call that data sufficent and form a
conclusion, or call it insufficient and not conclude anything, but the
data is still there, and those who make conclusions intelligently turn
out to be able to predict further phenomena accurately, using nothing
but the magic wand of inference.
There is consistency to the universe. It happens to be that way;
there is no particular logical, divorced-from-reality reason why
reality *should* consistently follow reasonably simple rules we can
determine by inference, but we find that it *does*. Cope.
This is why I have not much more patience for classical philosophy
than I have for religion. "The skeptic who argues that the evidence
doesn't matter unless there's further evidence supporting it"
hypocritically ignores his own argument when he has to decide whether
it's raining or remember where he parked his car. He has evidence
available and the evidence produces predictions that turn out to be
true.
Do philosophers go about naked in public under the justification that
just because they got arrested for indecent exposure yesterday,
there's no reason whatsoever to believe there's still a law against it
today? Why not? Answer: because they're not really the idiots they
do their best to pretend they are.
Even a philosopher remembers how long it generally takes to change
laws; he experiences the anti-nudity mores of his culture; he is
familiar with the ability of the press to propagate news of changes in
basic law; he has a lack of any indication such an unpopular move as
repealing decency standards was being considered by his government.
And he certainly does not believe all this evidence is "meaningless
without other evidence supporting it, ad infinitum", he wears his damn
clothes so he doesn't get arrested.
You and I and every creationist and every philosopher knows very well
you'll get arrested for being naked in public tomorrow just like you
would have today. How do we know this? If epistomology can't answer
that, epistomology has nothing to do with how the world works.
We expect consistency because it works to do so. If the philosopher
can provide an explanation as to *why* that's so, hey great, we'll
listen. But so long as the philosopher keeps complaining that
epistomology says induction works for no discernable reason, the
inescapable conclusion is that a philosopher can't find his ass with
both hands and a map. Induction works because the universe is, at
some levels, fundamentally simple.
> >Any epistimology that cannot
> >deal with that formulation is basically playing with itself.
>
> Any scientific approach that is confused about what counts as knowledge is
> certainly playing with itself.
Knowledge, smowledge. I don't really give a damn what you think
"counts as knowledge" -- you can use the word any old way you want. I
also don't give a damn whether philosophers can or can't cope with the
fact that we know things to be more or less likely to be true based on
the quantity and quality of evidence in their favor. We used this
principle to hold up bridges, cure polio, build the Web, and put human
beings on the moon. Epistomology says it doesn't work? Epistomology
can go fuck itself; the rest of us have a real world here.
eyelessgame (aa...@alumni.caltech.edu)
John Wilkins
> a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote...
I am consistently amazed that nonspecialists think that it is
self-evident that philosophy is just a waste of time, just like
creationists think it is self-evident that evolutionary biology is, and
for exactly the same reason.
Do you *really* think that epistemology is just some parlour game that
ignores reality? Do you really think that the extremely clever folk who
discuss these things don't know every single sophomoric objection you
have made here. Do you really think that questioning the basis on which
we do know things is tantamount to complete epistemic nihilism? I have
only ever met one such person, and he was psychologically disturbed.
Every single teacher I ever had concerning epistemology was well aware
that science works and that things behave consistently. But that still
doesn't answer the questions raised, how do we know what we know? Nor
does it explain how we must justify particular knowledge claims.
There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
part of the real world, have problems. They result in absurdities, or
they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know. If you are so
blind as to think that logical consistency is a bad thing, then you are
welcome to ignore it. Some of us think it matters. And frankly, fuck you
too. I'm sick of people treating my discipline as bullshit on the same
grounds that an Ed Conrad dismisses biology. The ignorant and arrogant
have no better right to state verities out of their arse than do anybody
else. You clearly do not understand thing one about Ockham's Razor, or
induction.
Brian L
(John Wilkins) wrote:
<snip>
>There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
>so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
>part of the real world, have problems. They result in absurdities, or
>they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know.
I dipped my toe into this thread before but quickly withdrew it
knowing I would drown if I went any further. But this has me curious
enough to try getting in up to my ankles. Could you give a couple of
examples of these absurdities?
dandelion
Skipping epistomoligy is skipping the question how to distingiush between a
fact and a belief. How do you _know_ something? In fact the question is so
fundamental that science itself isn't possible without answering it. That
question, in fact, is the basis underneath science. Take that away, and all
the neat toys thta were metioned cannot exist.
--
"I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a
week sometimes to make it up."
-- Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad"
David Jensen
dandelion <dand...@meadow.org> wrote in
<3e2188ab$0$144$8fcf...@news.wanadoo.nl>:
>Brian L wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 12:05:59 +0000 (UTC), john.w...@bigpond.com
>> (John Wilkins) wrote:
>>
>> <snip>
>>
>>>There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
>>>so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
>>>part of the real world, have problems. They result in absurdities, or
>>>they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know.
>>
>> I dipped my toe into this thread before but quickly withdrew it
>> knowing I would drown if I went any further. But this has me curious
>> enough to try getting in up to my ankles. Could you give a couple of
>> examples of these absurdities?
>
>Skipping epistomoligy is skipping the question how to distingiush between a
>fact and a belief. How do you _know_ something? In fact the question is so
>fundamental that science itself isn't possible without answering it. That
>question, in fact, is the basis underneath science. Take that away, and all
>the neat toys thta were metioned cannot exist.
On the other hand, the success of science and the technologies derived
from scientific discovery shows that the science is on a very firm
foundation. The fundamentalist pseudo-Christians who cheered when God's
prophets whipped Baal's prophets aren't willing to try a match against
science. They know they will lose.
Neil W Rickert
>aa...@oro.net (eyelessgame) wrote in
><e707421e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>>Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
>>"belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
>>try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
>>evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
>>supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
>sigh.
>(a) you imply a range of... what? credibility? between "belief" and
>"proof", but there's no reason to think there is such a range;
>(b) the essay was about what counts as knowledge. In this context it
>doesn't matter whether your beliefs are supported by evidence; what matters
>is *why* evidential support means anything at all. See the skeptic's
>argument in the essay for some reasons why evidential support may not
>entail anything.
You take this far too seriously.
Epistemology is mostly a system of word games played by philosophers,
and with little or no relevance to science. Scientists do not
call in consulting epistemologists to evaluate their work.
By the way, what justification do you offer for your apparent belief
that knowledge is justified true belief?
David Jensen
Neil W Rickert <ricke...@cs.niu.edu> wrote in
<avs2nm$a0j$3...@husk.cso.niu.edu>:
...
>You take this far too seriously.
>
>Epistemology is mostly a system of word games played by philosophers,
>and with little or no relevance to science. Scientists do not
>call in consulting epistemologists to evaluate their work.
It seems to me that every time scientists learn more and show how this
increasing knowledge is consistent with the knowledge gathered in the
past, that the epistemology is confirmed. For science, the
epistemological requirements or assumptions are simple and
straightforward and disprovable.
...
dandelion
> On the other hand, the success of science and the technologies derived
> from scientific discovery shows that the science is on a very firm
> foundation.
Right. Many people have drawn up some very rigid rules about when to accept
something as a fact (i.e. you *know* you know that because ...) and when to
treat it as a belief.
But that (AFAIK) is epistemology.
> The fundamentalist pseudo-Christians who cheered when God's
> prophets whipped Baal's prophets aren't willing to try a match against
> science. They know they will lose.
Sure.
--
Mother is far too clever to understand anything she does not like.
-- Arnold Bennett
dkomo
You found the counterexample to my claim pretty quickly here.
Religious belief is, of course, that counterexample. Believers in God
are going to assign a likelihood that their beliefs are true that will
be close to 100%. So no matter how many of these opinions are
processed statistically, the composite opinion will also be close to
100% likelihood, but this will not make that opinion "true" in any
real sense. The quality and quantity of evidence must absolutely be
factored in to avoid this kind of mistake.
I did indeed overlook examples like religious belief (and similar
beliefs in the occult and arcane like divination, crystal power, past
lives, communciation with the dead, etc.). But let me explain why I
made my statement in the first place.
There are examples where taking a large number of subjective
predictions from people and averaging them leads to a composite
prediction of extraordinary accuracy. Years ago I ran across a
fascinating book on betting horses written by two university
professors of statistics. They had spent several seasons gathering
data on actual race results and analyzed it to see if there were any
exploitable patterns that could be used to develop a successful
betting system.
If you've ever gone to a race, you know that there is a large
electronic tote board that displays continually updated odds for each
horse to win, place or show (come in 1st, 2nd or 3rd) in the upcoming
race. Before each race, there is a period of a half hour or so during
which the betting windows are open to allow the race crowd to place
their bets. As the money flows in, the tote board can electronically
compute the odds on each horse from the percentage of the total that
is bet on that horse, after the track "take" has been removed. These
odds tell the bettors what the payoff will be should that horse win,
place or show.
So here we have a situation where a crowd of thousands of bettors of
widely varying skill levels and knowledge of racing are individually
making partially subjective, partially objective predictions of
whether a horse will win, place or show in a race by placing the
corresponding bet on that horse. These predictions are almost
instantaneously boiled down to a single completely quantitative piece
of data: the odds on the horse. The bettors have their Daily Racing
Forms which contain the previous performances of all the horses along
with a large amount of background information regarding the horses'
pedigree, jockey, owner and so forth. The Daily Racing Form also
contains pre-race predictions of the odds on each horse by a half
dozen expert professional handicappers. In addition, the bettors have
access to the predictions of numerous "touts" who hawk their
predictions at the track. Finally, the bettors share their opinions
among themselves. The tote board becomes a source of feedback
information, reflecting this huge mass of information back upon
itself.
What the two professors did was to take the final odds on the horses
in each race and convert these to probabilities that these horses
would win, place or show. Then they compared these predicted
probabilities with the actual frequencies from the results of the
race. What they discovered made me exclaim at the time (as I remember
it now), "Are you f**g kidding me!" They discovered that the
favorites in the race win, place or show with a frequency that is
within a percentage point or two of the predicted frequency. In other
words, the predictions of the racing crowd were uncannily accurate.
This means that if you go to the track regularly and conservatively
bet the favorites, you'll end up losing a fraction of the total money
you bet over the season that is equal to the track take percentage.
I find this pretty amazing. Although it is relatively easy to say
that good horses will beat poor horses on average, there are just so
many variables and things that can go wrong in particular races that
accurately predicting the frequencies with which particular horses
finish 1st, 2nd or 3rd would seem to be impossible. Particularly with
a method as apparently chaotic as averaging the bets of several
thousand bettors of widely varying betting skills.
Yet it works.
There are similar such situations where the "law of mass likelihood"
seems to predominate. Betting on sporting events like baseball and
football. Betting (some call it "investing") in the stock market.
Voting in democratic elections. I'm also reminded of Isaac Asimov's
idea of "psychohistory" in his Foundation Trilogy. His idea was that
the aggregate social properties of tens of billions of human beings in
a galactic civilization were as predictable as the statistical
properties of gas molecules.
P.S. The professors did find highly exploitable statistical patterns
in the racing results. The next season they went out and made a tidy
sum of money betting horses (consistent with their rather modest risk
tolerance). But I won't reveal what these patterns were as this would
be off-topic for talk.origins and irrelevant to the discussion on
epistemology. ;>)
dkomo
You found the counterexample to my claim pretty quickly here.
darth_versive
> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>
> The purpose of this essay is to outline the basic issues in epistemology,
> which is the study of knowledge. Epistemological questions include
> questions such as "Is there such thing as knowledge?", "If there is
> knowledge, how do we acquire it?", and others. I believe this is on topic
> because many of the postings in talk.origins have to do with science, and
> epistemology is prior to science - after all, for science to be worthwhile,
> it has to at least contribute to human knowledge, and problems about human
> knowledge therefore go to the heart of this newsgroup's topic.
I would agree that traditional epistemology is prior to science. But
naturalistic epistemology (which I think is a better approach) is not
prior to science, but depends on science as a foundation to build
upon.
> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
>
> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical definition is:
> "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this definition can be, and
> has been, improved upon. Now we have a three-word definition of knowledge.
For the sake of argument, I'll go along with this definition for now.
> First let's start with "belief". What's a belief? A belief is a
> proposition that a person accepts as true. It is possible to have false
> beliefs; for example, if I believe that I am Napoleon Bonaparte, that would
> be a false belief (even though I think it's true). It would be absurd if
> someone were to say that he believes something yet knows that belief to be
> false, e.g. "It is raining outside, but I don't believe that it is raining
> outside." That is not a formal contradiction, but it is a very odd thing
> to say.
This is where naturalistic epistemology diverges from the epistemology
you are describing. "What is a belief?" is the very issue that
science must discover in order to build a foundation for epistemology.
Here we enter the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive
anthropology, psycholinguistics, sociology of knowledge, history of
ideas, comparative religion and mythology, etc., and until the
question is resolved, at least to the extent of developing good
working hypotheses, we can't really "know" what "knowledge" is.
Traditional epistemology may consider "what is a belief?" to be
something to be quickly defined away or deftly argued over, and then
on to the "real business" of epistemology, but I do not. Beliefs,
belief systems, conceptual frameworks, subjectivity, etc. are all
natural phenomena which need to be understood scientifically (at least
to a reasonable approximation) before we can go on to those issues
which traditional epistemology sees as the "nuts and bolts" of this
discipline (such as truth and justification, etc.).
At least, that's my own subjective view of it.
DV
Walter Bushell
<snip>
> Do you *really* think that epistemology is just some parlour game that
> ignores reality? Do you really think that the extremely clever folk who
> discuss these things don't know every single sophomoric objection you
> have made here. Do you really think that questioning the basis on which
> we do know things is tantamount to complete epistemic nihilism? I have
> only ever met one such person, and he was psychologically disturbed.
<Snip>
Accepting would leave any integrated personality (whatever that could
mean in this case) into what would be classified by our society as
psychologically disturbed. Just because complete epsistemic nihilism
leads to madness is not an argument against it. The consequences of an
idea have no bearing on its truth. :(
Or do you have a method for invalidating ideas that destroy any basis
for a reasonable human life?
Of course taking a vote on philisophic positions is even less justified.
--
Sartre was an optimist. He thought Hell was _other_ people.
Walter
Ananda Gupta
<3e210d58....@enews.newsguy.com>:
>I don't buy the idea that one can generally assign a useful
>subjective numerical probability, but I also don't see that as
>the real point. The problem is treating knowledge as if it were
>a crisp set, so to speak. It isn't, so trying to define a sharp
>boundary for it is pointless.
Adopting a fuzzy set does not solve this problem, since one must then
decide where the "fuzziness" begins.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
>On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 05:44:49 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
>Gupta) wrote:
>
>> aa...@oro.net (eyelessgame) wrote in
>> <e707421e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>
>>> Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
>>> "belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
>>> try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
>>> evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
>>> supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
>
>> sigh.
>
>> (a) you imply a range of... what? credibility? between "belief" and
>> "proof", but there's no reason to think there is such a range;
>
>That's a rather extraordinary statement. Would you care to try
>to justify it?
I should have said that it seems like a range between two entirely
different (but related) concepts -- that is, it's like drawing a number
line between zero and Y. If Y is taken as a variable representing a number
then it makes sense. If Y is just a letter of the alphabet then it makes
no sense. You'd have to clarify what you meant by "proof" and "belief".
>
>> (b) the essay was about what counts as knowledge. In this context it
>> doesn't matter whether your beliefs are supported by evidence; what
>> matters is *why* evidential support means anything at all. See the
>> skeptic's argument in the essay for some reasons why evidential
>> support may not entail anything.
>
>Since experience broadly confirms the value of evidential
>support
The skeptic denies this, since our experience if all our perceptions about
the world represent the genuine facts is the same as if our experience if
all our perceptions about the world represent a false world dreamed up by
the geek typing into the keyboard controlling what our senses tell us.
> It seems preferable to view it as an argument
>against trying to isolate knowledge as a well-defined subset of
>belief. While I'm perfectly happy to use 'knowledge' in an
>informal sense in the real world -- it's a useful term even if it
>*can't* be defined exactly -- in very careful usage I would say
>that there are simply more and less well justified beliefs.
OK, so which beliefs count as more justified and which as less? What's the
criterion?
ASG
darth_versive
<snip>
> Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
> "belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
> try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
> evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
> supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
>
> That's what science is, and why it works, and what the philosophers of
> 2000 years ago had no clue about. Propositions that are supported by
> more evidence are more likely to be true.
>
> Evolution, like gravity and heliocentrism, is very very likely true
> *because of the evidence supporting it*. Any epistimology that cannot
> deal with that formulation is basically playing with itself.
Hence the need for a naturalistic epistemology (see my earlier post in
this thread). The need is for modeling thinking as it actually is,
not for following blindly along with the herd and trying to tinker
with models from 2000 years ago which rest on bad foundations.
Traditional epistemology hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that
beliefs themselves are natural phenomena, and thus within the realm of
science, so it goes off the track and gets lost within mazes of its
own construction (IMO).
Naturalistic epistemology holds that scientific *evidence* about the
nature of beliefs precedes epistemological formulations, while
traditional epistemology holds that *its own formulations* precede
science.
DV
Ananda Gupta
<1fop3r5.1apfy5v1s0q4siN%john.w...@bigpond.com>:
<snip>
I knew it was a good idea to read your post before posting my own reply, as
you've said what I wanted to, and more eloquently than I would have too.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
>Epistemology is mostly a system of word games played by philosophers,
>and with little or no relevance to science.
If you think it is a "word game" to wonder how we know what it is we know,
then all that shows is that you are uninterested in fundamental questions.
That's fine, especially for people who are willing to take the answers to
those questions for granted, but that by no means renders those questions
trivial.
> Scientists do not
>call in consulting epistemologists to evaluate their work.
Precisely because they take the answers for granted.
>By the way, what justification do you offer for your apparent belief
>that knowledge is justified true belief?
I intentionally left my own views, including my own preferred answer to the
skeptic, out of the essay. But I'm curious -- do you have a better
definition?
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<8e0e3045.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
>>
>> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical
>> definition is: "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this
>> definition can be, and has been, improved upon. Now we have a
>> three-word definition of knowledge.
>
>For the sake of argument, I'll go along with this definition for now.
>
>Traditional epistemology may consider "what is a belief?" to be
>something to be quickly defined away or deftly argued over, and then
>on to the "real business" of epistemology, but I do not.
Certainly one would have to demonstrate a problem with the given definition
of a belief, which is a proposition thought to be true by someone (the
belief-holder). To me this definition seems unproblematic; what's your
objection to it?
> Beliefs,
>belief systems, conceptual frameworks, subjectivity, etc. are all
>natural phenomena which need to be understood scientifically (at least
>to a reasonable approximation) before we can go on to those issues
>which traditional epistemology sees as the "nuts and bolts" of this
>discipline (such as truth and justification, etc.).
Suppose we do have a scientific understanding of the bits you mention above
(although I confess I have no idea what you mean by a scientific
understanding of e.g. the belief that it's raining). Presumably that
understanding is comprised of some allegedly well-supported propositions
about those things. But it still has gotten us nowhere because you haven't
offered an account of what it is for a proposition to be well-supported, or
what would be necessary and sufficient for us to *accept* these scientific
understandings. That's what I meant by saying epistemology is prior to
science; one must first have a view, implicit or not, about questions like
that, before one can even do science.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
>Hence the need for a naturalistic epistemology (see my earlier post in
>this thread). The need is for modeling thinking as it actually is,
>not for following blindly along with the herd and trying to tinker
>with models from 2000 years ago which rest on bad foundations.
>Traditional epistemology hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that
>beliefs themselves are natural phenomena, and thus within the realm of
>science, so it goes off the track and gets lost within mazes of its
>own construction (IMO).
Just out of curiosity, are you familiar with any of the *criticisms* of
e.g. multivalent logic? None of the links you provided in an earlier post
seemed to contain reference to any such criticisms, or to anticipate
objections.
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<snip>
My mistake in an earlier post; I forgot that dkomo, not you, made the post
with several links to pages about multivalent logic.
dkomo
I don't think it's a waste of time. I think it's a stimulator of
adventures in thinking, a fertile generator of questions about basic
reality, and a creative supplier of innumerable different answers to
those questions. Choose your favorite. The problem seems to be that
it doesn't have any good way of deciding which of the many answers it
generates is the right one. That's why I think a fusion of philosophy
with the scientific and engineering disciplines is the tonic needed.
Philosophical engineering.
> Do you *really* think that epistemology is just some parlour game that
> ignores reality? Do you really think that the extremely clever folk who
> discuss these things don't know every single sophomoric objection you
> have made here.
I, for one, would like to hear some rebuttals to these objections. I
didn't think the objections were all that sophomoric.
> Do you really think that questioning the basis on which
> we do know things is tantamount to complete epistemic nihilism? I have
> only ever met one such person, and he was psychologically disturbed.
> Every single teacher I ever had concerning epistemology was well aware
> that science works and that things behave consistently. But that still
> doesn't answer the questions raised, how do we know what we know? Nor
> does it explain how we must justify particular knowledge claims.
>
> There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> part of the real world, have problems.
Such as?
Have you ever considered the idea that philosphy itself is built on an
inductive foundation? That is, the deductive reasoning which
philosophy prides itself on has been used all these thousands of years
because it works. That was the basic empirical discovery of the
Greeks. Logic works. That's an inductive truth.
So when philosophy is so critical of induction and empiricism, it is
actually engaging in the dreaded (by philosophy) circularity of
thinking.
> They result in absurdities, or
> they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know. If you are so
> blind as to think that logical consistency is a bad thing, then you are
> welcome to ignore it. Some of us think it matters. And frankly, fuck you
> too. I'm sick of people treating my discipline as bullshit on the same
> grounds that an Ed Conrad dismisses biology. The ignorant and arrogant
> have no better right to state verities out of their arse than do anybody
> else. You clearly do not understand thing one about Ockham's Razor, or
> induction.
> --
For a while there I was worried that you were being ad hominem in your
reply. But Ananda Gupta in his followup post called your reply
"eloquent" and so set my mind at ease. ;o)
dkomo
If only there were 48 hours in the day. I still hope to reply to
least one or two of the criticisms you made. Unfortunately these
replies take a bit more work than some of the more
off-the-top-of-my-head replies.
Neil W Rickert
>Neil W Rickert <ricke...@cs.niu.edu> wrote in
><avs2nm$a0j$3...@husk.cso.niu.edu>:
>>Epistemology is mostly a system of word games played by philosophers,
>>and with little or no relevance to science.
>If you think it is a "word game" to wonder how we know what it is we know,
>then all that shows is that you are uninterested in fundamental questions.
That isn't what I said at all. It seems like a dishonest answer.
>That's fine, especially for people who are willing to take the answers to
>those questions for granted, but that by no means renders those questions
>trivial.
>> Scientists do not
>>call in consulting epistemologists to evaluate their work.
>Precisely because they take the answers for granted.
I will expect you to provide justification for that assertion.
>>By the way, what justification do you offer for your apparent belief
>>that knowledge is justified true belief?
>I intentionally left my own views, including my own preferred answer to the
>skeptic, out of the essay. But I'm curious -- do you have a better
>definition?
You miss the point.
If "knowledge = justified true belief" is the *definition* of knowledge,
then the term "knowledge", so used, is an abstract theoretical term
within epistemology. There is no basis whatsoever to assume that
it has any relation to the term "knowledge" as used in ordinary
speech.
If you want to say that it is the same as the ordinary term, then
a great deal of empirical research would be needed to justify that
claim. As far as I can tell, epistemologists have not done that
empirical research.
John Wilkins
Let's see... gosh we can solve some problems so all knowledge is
scientific? That's not sophomoric?
How's this: folk medicine has for thousands if not hundreds of thousands
of years enabled people to live in a host of difficult environments. So
therefore it must be more correct than science.
Disagree? Good. Now you are doing philosophy...
>
> > Do you really think that questioning the basis on which
> > we do know things is tantamount to complete epistemic nihilism? I have
> > only ever met one such person, and he was psychologically disturbed.
> > Every single teacher I ever had concerning epistemology was well aware
> > that science works and that things behave consistently. But that still
> > doesn't answer the questions raised, how do we know what we know? Nor
> > does it explain how we must justify particular knowledge claims.
> >
> > There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> > so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> > part of the real world, have problems.
>
> Such as?
>
> Have you ever considered the idea that philosphy itself is built on an
> inductive foundation? That is, the deductive reasoning which
> philosophy prides itself on has been used all these thousands of years
> because it works. That was the basic empirical discovery of the
> Greeks. Logic works. That's an inductive truth.
>
> So when philosophy is so critical of induction and empiricism, it is
> actually engaging in the dreaded (by philosophy) circularity of
> thinking.
"Philosophy" is not critical of anything. Philosophy is not a single
agent capable of being critical or approving. There are philosophies -
some of them are opposed to induction, some aren't. Some it's hard to
tell.
I am an inductivist, and what's worse, a nativist inductivist. We do
well at inductions because we are innately inductive cognitive machines.
That is a *philosophical* position, and it has to be explored, explained
and justified. You cannot merely *assert* it and say, "well, now, that's
it for philosophy, eh?" If you do, then you are showing a complete lack
of critical thinking. Nothing comes for free. The issue is not whether
induction works, but *why*, and in what circumstances.
That dismissive mindset would have meant that Boole, Frege, Tarski, and
a host of other logicians should have stuck happily with Aristotelian
syllogisms - after all, it worked just fine for everyone until the
nineteenth century, so why change it? Forget Hilbert, forget Gödel,
forget Turing.
Every answer to a conceptual problem raises novel problems. In the
solving of them we make progress in philosophy, and often we find that
some of the "solutions" have been explored, often fruitlessly, many
times before. It is hubris to think that just because we now do science
that we have somehow solved the classical problems of knowledge and
logic. Philosophy may argue to a standstill, but that is a standstill
that scientists as much as anybody else is committed to - at worst you
have to make a choice; at best you might resolve some longstanding
problems. But mostly, scientists who dabble in this matter tend to be
extremely naive and ignorant, and declare problems solved in ways that
have deep flaws.
>
> > They result in absurdities, or
> > they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know. If you are so
> > blind as to think that logical consistency is a bad thing, then you are
> > welcome to ignore it. Some of us think it matters. And frankly, fuck you
> > too. I'm sick of people treating my discipline as bullshit on the same
> > grounds that an Ed Conrad dismisses biology. The ignorant and arrogant
> > have no better right to state verities out of their arse than do anybody
> > else. You clearly do not understand thing one about Ockham's Razor, or
> > induction.
> > --
>
> For a while there I was worried that you were being ad hominem in your
> reply. But Ananda Gupta in his followup post called your reply
> "eloquent" and so set my mind at ease. ;o)
>
No, I was being deliberately, knowingly and forcefully ad hominem. Tit
for tat, you see. Someone says I can fuck off, then I say they can. I
get pissed off occasionaly at the anti-philosophy mindset, as if it was
in any way different to the know-nothingness of creationism.
Some philosophy sucks. I am the first to admit that. But it takes
*years* to work through the complexities of any intellectual tradition,
and those who think a few simplistic considerations somehow undercut the
raison d'etre for an entire discipline are just being moronic. If you
have criticisms of *anything* - theology, science, art, architecture,
philosophy - you have to read the material first. It's basic
intellectual honesty.
Of course we could just treat intellectual matters as tribal fights. I'm
sure that the creationists would love that. Then we get to the point
where conceptual problems are solved by whoever can get the biggest
vote, or the largest army. I'll stick with a sense of rationality, if
you don't mind.
--
John Wilkins
B'dies, Brutius
John Wilkins
> aa...@oro.net (eyelessgame) wrote...
>
> <snip>
>
> > Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
> > "belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
> > try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
> > evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
> > supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
> >
> > That's what science is, and why it works, and what the philosophers of
> > 2000 years ago had no clue about. Propositions that are supported by
> > more evidence are more likely to be true.
> >
> > Evolution, like gravity and heliocentrism, is very very likely true
> > *because of the evidence supporting it*. Any epistimology that cannot
> > deal with that formulation is basically playing with itself.
>
> Hence the need for a naturalistic epistemology (see my earlier post in
> this thread). The need is for modeling thinking as it actually is,
> not for following blindly along with the herd and trying to tinker
> with models from 2000 years ago which rest on bad foundations.
> Traditional epistemology hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that
> beliefs themselves are natural phenomena, and thus within the realm of
> science, so it goes off the track and gets lost within mazes of its
> own construction (IMO).
I disagree with this if by "traditional epistemology" you mean people
like the Churchlands, Sosa, Dretske, Kornblith, Kim, Nagel, Peacocke,
Audi, Goldman and a host of others - these are just the ones trhat come
to mind. Of course modern epistemology is naturalistic. The problem
remains, how? And guess what? It is the old problem of getting
prescriptive warrant from descriptive facts. Or, in "traditional" terms,
the is-ought distinction.
I have my own view, and unsurprisingly it is an evolutionary view - our
synthetic a prioria (beliefs which are not true by definition, and yet
which we need to kick off our ability to make inductive and abductive
inferences) are the a posterioria of evolution. But that raises its own
problems, because evolution cannot ensure that an adaptation is optimal,
merely that it is adequate to the past (and guess what? This is just the
old problem of inductive justification).
And if a scientist is doing science about the way scientists do science,
is there *no* philosophical problem here? I have Thoughts about that as
well.
>
> Naturalistic epistemology holds that scientific *evidence* about the
> nature of beliefs precedes epistemological formulations, while
> traditional epistemology holds that *its own formulations* precede
> science.
>
Let me get this straight - an epistemology says that something precedes
epistemology? Am I the only one who thinks this is a tad... circular?
But of course, that would be to start a philosophical discussion.
Let's just rest happy in the knowledge (D'oh!) that we live in the best
of all possible worlds...
Brian M. Scott
Gupta) wrote:
>b.s...@csuohio.edu (Brian M. Scott) wrote in
><3e211711....@enews.newsguy.com>:
>>On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 05:44:49 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
>>Gupta) wrote:
>>> aa...@oro.net (eyelessgame) wrote in
>>> <e707421e.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>>>> Bingo. Dkomo put his finger right on it here. Between the notion of
>>>> "belief" and "proof" (which many philosophers and many creationists
>>>> try to claim is all there is) is the huge category of "supported by
>>>> evidence", which is what /all/ proposition in the real world are --
>>>> supported by some amount of evidence (the amount can be zero).
>>> sigh.
>>> (a) you imply a range of... what? credibility? between "belief" and
>>> "proof", but there's no reason to think there is such a range;
>>That's a rather extraordinary statement. Would you care to try
>>to justify it?
>I should have said that it seems like a range between two entirely
>different (but related) concepts -- that is, it's like drawing a number
>line between zero and Y. If Y is taken as a variable representing a number
>then it makes sense. If Y is just a letter of the alphabet then it makes
>no sense. You'd have to clarify what you meant by "proof" and "belief".
Dunno exactly what eyelessgame meant by the terms themselves, but
it seemed clear to me that he was objecting either to the idea
that in order to be classified as knowledge, a belief has to be
completely justifiable -- subject to 'proof' in some sense -- or
perhaps to the idea that knowledge in this sense is even
possible. I gave my own related position later in that same
post.
>>> (b) the essay was about what counts as knowledge. In this context it
>>> doesn't matter whether your beliefs are supported by evidence; what
>>> matters is *why* evidential support means anything at all. See the
>>> skeptic's argument in the essay for some reasons why evidential
>>> support may not entail anything.
>>Since experience broadly confirms the value of evidential
>>support
>The skeptic denies this, since our experience if all our perceptions about
>the world represent the genuine facts is the same as if our experience if
>all our perceptions about the world represent a false world dreamed up by
>the geek typing into the keyboard controlling what our senses tell us.
The skeptic who does so commits a non sequitur. It makes no
difference whether our perceptions represent the genuine facts;
we live in the world of our perceptions, and in that world
experience does show that evidential support means something.
That is apparently the way our world works, whether it's the real
world (whatever that may be) or an imposed virtual reality of
some kind.
>> It seems preferable to view it as an argument
>>against trying to isolate knowledge as a well-defined subset of
>>belief. While I'm perfectly happy to use 'knowledge' in an
>>informal sense in the real world -- it's a useful term even if it
>>*can't* be defined exactly -- in very careful usage I would say
>>that there are simply more and less well justified beliefs.
>OK, so which beliefs count as more justified and which as less? What's the
>criterion?
Criteria, I'm sure.
I'm not the person to ask; even in my own field -- mathematics --
my forte was always counterexamples, not theory-building. I
think that mine is a better framework, but I'm not interested in
working out a theory to flesh it out. Not only do my main
interests lie elsewhere, but I very much doubt that a
satisfactory account is possible, and I see no point in producing
one that I myself would consider grossly unsatisfactory. (And
you'll have to work harder than that to con me into committing
philosophy! <g>)
Brian
Bill Rogers
> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>
>
> That, in a nutshell, is what I see as the relevance of epistemology to what
> we are talking about in this newsgroup. Obviously this is not a philosophy
> newsgroup, but I think it is important to be clear about those views one
> holds (implicitly or not) that are prior to science, because they have a
> way of trickling in and leaving a stain.
That would indeed be great as an FAQ. It is great to have you posting.
Not that our other resident philosopher isn't interesting, too, but
you are very clear. Kant and Hume are both interesting, but it's a lot
less painful to read Hume, if you get my drift. And that line about
bad epistemological assumptions trickling in and leaving a stain is
wonderful.
Bill
John Wilkins
> a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote...
> > EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
> >
> <snip for length>
> >
> > That, in a nutshell, is what I see as the relevance of epistemology to what
> > we are talking about in this newsgroup. Obviously this is not a philosophy
> > newsgroup, but I think it is important to be clear about those views one
> > holds (implicitly or not) that are prior to science, because they have a
> > way of trickling in and leaving a stain.
>
>
> That would indeed be great as an FAQ. It is great to have you posting.
> Not that our other resident philosopher isn't interesting, too, but
> you are very clear. Kant and Hume are both interesting, but it's a lot
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> less painful to read Hume, if you get my drift. And that line about
> bad epistemological assumptions trickling in and leaving a stain is
> wonderful.
>
If I wasn't so close to resembling that remark, I'd be hurt...
While we are on nice one-liners, here's one from van Fraassen: "It is
not an epistemological principle that one might as well hang for a sheep
as for a lamb" (_Scientific Image_, p72).
--
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
Ananda Gupta
>Dunno exactly what eyelessgame meant by the terms themselves, but
>it seemed clear to me that he was objecting either to the idea
>that in order to be classified as knowledge, a belief has to be
>completely justifiable -- subject to 'proof' in some sense -- or
>perhaps to the idea that knowledge in this sense is even
>possible. I gave my own related position later in that same
>post.
That wasn't as clear to me -- it seemed to me that he was saying that
"proof" (what I think he thought I meant by "knowledge") was not actually
belief.
>> The skeptic denies this, since our experience if all our perceptions
>> about the world represent the genuine facts is the same as if our
>> experience if all our perceptions about the world represent a false
>> world dreamed up by the geek typing into the keyboard controlling what
>> our senses tell us.
>
>The skeptic who does so commits a non sequitur. It makes no
>difference whether our perceptions represent the genuine facts
!
In any case, the skeptic isn't committed to denying that in whatever world
we live in certain things *appear* to be the case.
>we live in the world of our perceptions, and in that world
>experience does show that evidential support means something.
Sort of. For creationists (to put it back on topic), it may mean
something, but it means much less compared to the other things they
perceive. It seems to me that the line you are adopting here undermines
any real answer to creationism.
>That is apparently the way our world works, whether it's the real
>world (whatever that may be) or an imposed virtual reality of
>some kind.
As above -- the creationist may maintain that the way our world works is
that God created the world 6,000 years ago and all appearances to the
contrary are tests of our faith, and that this is perfectly apparent. The
nature of those tests, or the reasons for God's doing this, are not
relevant to this apparent way the world works. What's wrong with saying
that?
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<8984713a.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote in message
>news:<Xns92FFA64...@199.45.49.11>...
>> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>That would indeed be great as an FAQ. It is great to have you posting.
>Not that our other resident philosopher isn't interesting, too, but
>you are very clear. Kant and Hume are both interesting, but it's a lot
>less painful to read Hume, if you get my drift. And that line about
>bad epistemological assumptions trickling in and leaving a stain is
>wonderful.
Many thanks :)
and no apologies needed for jumping into the other thread.
ASG
Bill Rogers
> Bill Rogers <bro...@noguchi.mimcom.net> wrote:
>
> > a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote...
> > > EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
> > >
> <snip for length>
> > >
> > > That, in a nutshell, is what I see as the relevance of epistemology to what
> > > we are talking about in this newsgroup. Obviously this is not a philosophy
> > > newsgroup, but I think it is important to be clear about those views one
> > > holds (implicitly or not) that are prior to science, because they have a
> > > way of trickling in and leaving a stain.
> >
> >
> > That would indeed be great as an FAQ. It is great to have you posting.
> > Not that our other resident philosopher isn't interesting, too, but
> > you are very clear. Kant and Hume are both interesting, but it's a lot
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > less painful to read Hume, if you get my drift. And that line about
> > bad epistemological assumptions trickling in and leaving a stain is
> > wonderful.
> >
> If I wasn't so close to resembling that remark, I'd be hurt...
I knew you could take it. And in fact you do seem to revel in the
complexity, jargon, and literature citing involved in professional
philosophy. But I didn't mean to be rude. Your posts are very
educational, just that they do sometimes induce the same sort of brain
pain that the Prolegomena does.
>
> While we are on nice one-liners, here's one from van Fraassen: "It is
> not an epistemological principle that one might as well hang for a sheep
> as for a lamb" (_Scientific Image_, p72).
Hey, mutton from mutton leaves mutton.
Bill
eyelessgame
> eyelessgame <aa...@oro.net> wrote:
>
> > Knowledge, smowledge. I don't really give a damn what you think
> > "counts as knowledge" -- you can use the word any old way you want. I
> > also don't give a damn whether philosophers can or can't cope with the
> > fact that we know things to be more or less likely to be true based on
> > the quantity and quality of evidence in their favor. We used this
> > principle to hold up bridges, cure polio, build the Web, and put human
> > beings on the moon. Epistomology says it doesn't work? Epistomology
> > can go fuck itself; the rest of us have a real world here.
> >
> > eyelessgame (aa...@alumni.caltech.edu)
>
> I am consistently amazed that nonspecialists think that it is
> self-evident that philosophy is just a waste of time, just like
> creationists think it is self-evident that evolutionary biology is, and
> for exactly the same reason.
I do /not/ think it is a waste of time; I think it is a discipline
that has far less to do with science than it thinks it does.
At 3 AM when I wrote the post above, I failed to distinguish between
the abstract (and interesting) pursuit of epistomology, and the
"skeptic's (postmodernist) position" of essentially nihilism, which
was what Anand was using to phrase an objection to scientific inquiry.
(By the way, if you follow a religion, do you think that the studies
of members of other religions are a waste of time? If you aren't
religious, do you think the study of religion is a waste of time? I'm
not talking about the people who study what religion is, or the
philosophical nature of it; I'm talking about the people who spend
hours and hours in bible study or Koran reading, who attempt to
discern the meaning behind every single biblical passage or every
single Koran, or Book of Mormon, or whatever, claim. Aren't at least
some of those people spending their lives self-deluded into thinking
their interesting abstraction has a lot more to do with the real world
than it actually does?)
> Do you *really* think that epistemology is just some parlour game that
> ignores reality? Do you really think that the extremely clever folk who
> discuss these things don't know every single sophomoric objection you
> have made here. Do you really think that questioning the basis on which
> we do know things is tantamount to complete epistemic nihilism?
No, and I failed to distinguish sufficiently between the general study
of epistomology and the specific nihilistic/"skeptical"/postmodernist
position being presented. But /as stated/, the position that "all
evidence is meaningless without other evidence to back it up, ad
infinitum" is a load of crap. I don't think you or any other
intelligent person really espouses it, and this was the point I tried
to make.
I have
> only ever met one such person, and he was psychologically disturbed.
> Every single teacher I ever had concerning epistemology was well aware
> that science works and that things behave consistently. But that still
> doesn't answer the questions raised, how do we know what we know? Nor
> does it explain how we must justify particular knowledge claims.
And that's an interesting question. But it has nothing to do with
actually learning the behavior of the universe, or of determining what
has happened in the past -- which are scientific endeavors that might
benefit from, but are in no way dependent on, investigating these
abstract questions.
> There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> part of the real world, have problems. They result in absurdities, or
> they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know.
I am willing to be educated. Please give examples?
> If you are so
> blind as to think that logical consistency is a bad thing, then you are
> welcome to ignore it. Some of us think it matters. And frankly, fuck you
> too.
Logical consistency isn't at all a bad thing. And again, I'm willing
to be educated.
> I'm sick of people treating my discipline as bullshit on the same
> grounds that an Ed Conrad dismisses biology. The ignorant and arrogant
> have no better right to state verities out of their arse than do anybody
> else.
But statements like "science is impossible without understanding
philosophy" don't help philosophers be taken seriously by scientists.
> You clearly do not understand thing one about Ockham's Razor, or
> induction.
I certainly can learn more than I know now. Tell me what was wrong
with what I said, please.
Brian M. Scott
news:Xns9301AC8...@199.45.49.11 in talk.origins:
I don't see that as a problem: it's *all* fuzzy. Some bits are
just much less so than other bits. If I were actually trying to
build a theory, I'm not at all sure that I'd use fuzzy sets;
assigning truth values from a large complete Boolean algebra, as
in forcing, might be a better way to go.
Brian
eyelessgame
> Brian L wrote:
>
> > On Sun, 12 Jan 2003 12:05:59 +0000 (UTC), john.w...@bigpond.com
> > (John Wilkins) wrote:
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> >>There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> >>so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> >>part of the real world, have problems. They result in absurdities, or
> >>they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know.
> >
> > knowing I would drown if I went any further. But this has me curious
> > enough to try getting in up to my ankles. Could you give a couple of
> > examples of these absurdities?
>
> Skipping epistomoligy is skipping the question how to distingiush between a
> fact and a belief. How do you _know_ something? In fact the question is so
> fundamental that science itself isn't possible without answering it. That
> question, in fact, is the basis underneath science. Take that away, and all
> the neat toys thta were metioned cannot exist.
I will note that this is an assertion, not an example. Could you
give a couple examples?
A scientist's epistomology for whether a proposition is true is "check
whether the proposition fits observed phenomena". The longer it fits,
the more cases it fits, the longer it goes without not fitting, the
more confident we are that the statement will continue to fit (which
is the only definition of "truth" a scientist needs).
darth_versive
> darth_...@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
> <8e0e3045.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>
> >> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
> >>
> >> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical
> >> definition is: "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this
> >> definition can be, and has been, improved upon. Now we have a
> >> three-word definition of knowledge.
> >
> >For the sake of argument, I'll go along with this definition for now.
> >
> >Traditional epistemology may consider "what is a belief?" to be
> >something to be quickly defined away or deftly argued over, and then
> >on to the "real business" of epistemology, but I do not.
>
> Certainly one would have to demonstrate a problem with the given definition
> of a belief, which is a proposition thought to be true by someone (the
> belief-holder). To me this definition seems unproblematic; what's your
> objection to it?
My objection to it is just what I wrote below: that it is a complex
natural phenomenon which is not well understood, and needs further
research within the sorts of fields that I mentioned below. If
knowledge is "justified true belief," and "belief" is an undefined
term, or a term defined arbitrarily or through clever argument, or one
taken for granted in its common-sense meaning, then there's a problem.
It's the problem of subjectivity. "What exactly is it?" and "How does
it work?" are not topics that you can just bypass on the way to asking
how to "justify" "true" "beliefs". Within the subjective
understanding of most traditional epistemologists, this isn't a
problem, since the definition of "belief" is not problematic, and the
idea of subjectivivity itself as a natural phenomenon is not taken
very seriously. But I would maintain that the process of defining
words themselves, and the way words are defined within a given
conceptual framework, is an integral part of the phenomenon of
subjectivity itself that needs to be understood scientifically. So we
have a clash of perspectives on the issue (which is itself also part
of the phenomenon of subjectivity). See where I'm going with this?
> > Beliefs,
> >belief systems, conceptual frameworks, subjectivity, etc. are all
> >natural phenomena which need to be understood scientifically (at least
> >to a reasonable approximation) before we can go on to those issues
> >which traditional epistemology sees as the "nuts and bolts" of this
> >discipline (such as truth and justification, etc.).
>
> Suppose we do have a scientific understanding of the bits you mention above
> (although I confess I have no idea what you mean by a scientific
> understanding of e.g. the belief that it's raining). Presumably that
> understanding is comprised of some allegedly well-supported propositions
> about those things. But it still has gotten us nowhere because you haven't
> offered an account of what it is for a proposition to be well-supported, or
> what would be necessary and sufficient for us to *accept* these scientific
> understandings. That's what I meant by saying epistemology is prior to
> science; one must first have a view, implicit or not, about questions like
> that, before one can even do science.
And this is what I meant when I said that a naturalistic epistemology
is not prior to science. Science is what it is, and using
"well-supported propositions" or not, it makes discoveries. When it
makes sufficient discoveries about the nature of beliefs and the
nature of subjectivity, then naturalistic epistemology will have a
solid foundation. Until then, it won't, and there's no use to try to
answer questions about how to justifify true beliefs.
But from a traditional epistemological perspective, this isn't the
case, since before science can even *start* investigating the nature
of beliefs, there will have to be an "account of what it is for a
proposition to be well-supported." And this is precisely one of the
Catch-22 mazes that traditional epistemology spins for itself which
demonstrates (to me, anyway) that traditional epistemology doesn't
work very well in the modern world of scientific thought, but is an
anachronism better suited to the Ancient world or the Middle Ages (or
academic philosophy departments, or philosophy journals, etc., where
this way of thinking is preserved). In the probable case that you
can't follow my reasoning on this, I'd just say that traditional
epistemology leads to its own subjective perspective on this
issue--which can be hard to break out of--and that in order to get my
drift, you'd have to become more familiar with the mainstream
scientific perspective on the world, and on scientific methodology
itself, with hypotheses making sense of the available evidence, not
comprised of "propositions which are well-supported" in a
philosophical sense. For example, re-read the posts by "eyelessgame"
in this thread about how scientific inference works in practice. But
you could also talk to any number of practicing scientists.
Sorry if this isn't very helpful, but that's the nature of beliefs,
conceptual frameworks, and subjectivity--sometimes those with
different perspectives can't understand each other very well because
of the conceptual gulf between them. And sometimes more detailed
explanations only serve to widen the gulf even more, rather than to
bridge it. But that's the way it is.
DV
Mark Isaak
Pretending that there is no problem does not solve the problem,
either; in fact, it guarantees that the problem won't be solved.
Recognizing that sets are often fuzzy, and making a first guess at
where and how much, is at least an improvement over the demonstrably
false position that dichotomies are always absolute.
--
Mark Isaak at...@earthlink.net
Don't read everything you belive.
darth_versive
> darth_versive <darth_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
<snip>
> > Hence the need for a naturalistic epistemology (see my earlier post in
> > this thread). The need is for modeling thinking as it actually is,
> > not for following blindly along with the herd and trying to tinker
> > with models from 2000 years ago which rest on bad foundations.
> > Traditional epistemology hasn't yet come to terms with the fact that
> > beliefs themselves are natural phenomena, and thus within the realm of
> > science, so it goes off the track and gets lost within mazes of its
> > own construction (IMO).
>
> I disagree with this if by "traditional epistemology" you mean people
> like the Churchlands, Sosa, Dretske, Kornblith, Kim, Nagel, Peacocke,
> Audi, Goldman and a host of others - these are just the ones trhat come
> to mind. Of course modern epistemology is naturalistic. The problem
> remains, how? And guess what? It is the old problem of getting
> prescriptive warrant from descriptive facts. Or, in "traditional" terms,
> the is-ought distinction.
Let's just say that of those modern epistemologists that I've looked
at that write on "naturalized epistemology," like Quine or Kornblith,
etc., I would classify them as "hybrid traditional/naturalistic" in
their approach. That is, not naturalistic enough to suit me. I think
that they should just let go of trying to answer the traditional
epistemological questions for now and go full-steam-ahead into
cognitive psychology, cognitive anthropology, psycholinguistics,
sociology of knowledge, history of ideas, comparative religion and
mythology, etc., and try to understand beliefs, belief systems,
conceptual frameworks, and subjectivity scientifically. And then come
back to the traditional epistemological issues later. But it seems
clear to me that they're not likely to do this, and so I say, "more
power to them" to do what they want to do. But I don't have to go
along with them.
> I have my own view, and unsurprisingly it is an evolutionary view - our
> synthetic a prioria (beliefs which are not true by definition, and yet
> which we need to kick off our ability to make inductive and abductive
> inferences) are the a posterioria of evolution. But that raises its own
> problems, because evolution cannot ensure that an adaptation is optimal,
> merely that it is adequate to the past (and guess what? This is just the
> old problem of inductive justification).
Yes. I'm aware of your views. And while I may disagree with them
where the memetics hypothesis is concerned, I do agree with them where
the larger framework of evolution, selection pressure and adaptation
is concerned.
> And if a scientist is doing science about the way scientists do science,
> is there *no* philosophical problem here? I have Thoughts about that as
> well.
> >
> > Naturalistic epistemology holds that scientific *evidence* about the
> > nature of beliefs precedes epistemological formulations, while
> > traditional epistemology holds that *its own formulations* precede
> > science.
>
> Let me get this straight - an epistemology says that something precedes
> epistemology? Am I the only one who thinks this is a tad... circular?
> But of course, that would be to start a philosophical discussion.
In a sense, yes. But from my perspective, no. I'm just saying that
before we can figure out how to "justify true beliefs," or ask "what
is true knowledge?," or "what are the limits of knowledge?," etc., we
need to understand what "beliefs" are, scientifically. I'm saying
that traditional epistemology has jumped the gun on this one. Science
works. Traditional epistemology doesn't work (from my perspective).
Naturalistic epistemology *may*, in principle, be prior to those
sciences which don't deal with the nature of beliefs (like
evolutionary biology, astronomy, chemistry, etc.); but since the
concept of a belief itself is part of the equation of "justified true
beliefs," it is *not* prior to those sciences which *do* deal with the
nature of beliefs. That's what I'm saying. It is *those* sciences
which are prior to *naturalistic epistemology*. Doesn't seem circular
to me. Now, if you define naturalistic epistemology in the same terms
by which traditional epistemology defines itself, then you *do* have a
problem of circularity. But they're two different things.
(Incidentally, not understanding that they are two different things is
another problem I have with those whom I call the "hybrid
traditional/naturalistic epistemolgists").
DV
John Wilkins
Well I prefer to think of it (and if I had *any* programming and math
skills I'd build a model) as a web of interconnecting propositions each
with a weighting applied by the distance of the proposition from the
empirical periphery. The more central a proposition in the web, the less
likely it is to be revised by empirical experiences. This, of course, is
Quine and Ullian's web of belief. And Quine, of course, allowed that
*all* beliefs are in principle reviseable, and rationally so. A rational
revision is where the proposition is replaced or revised to be
consistent with the overall web.
Is this what you had in mind?
John Wilkins
The vagueness problem is a long-standing one, and I think that the
fuzziness proponents are being a bit too easy with it. Sets are often
*clustered*, with no sharp boundary, but for any cluster you can draw a
boundary where all members are in it. The issue is when you cannot do
this without including non-members, like trying to include only kidney
cells but not vascular cells in a surgical excision).
Fuzzy sets themselves come as continuous curves with no sharp
boundaries, but with a minumum point that can non-arbitrarily act as the
demarcation point. In this respect they are effectively statistical
populations.
But all this does not resolve the matter. We can often tell by looking
at such sets where the boundary is, but when it comes to rigorous ways
to recognise it, we cannot. Hence, some believe that even the fuzziest
of sets, if it is a set at all, must be a matter of inclusion or
exclusion; one cannot be partly in and partly out.
For myself, I think that vague *predicates* are inescapable in dealing
with the world - as Wittgenstein said, it makes sense to say, "stand
[roughly] there" and point. But ostension, as this is called (definition
by pointing) runs up against what has been called the Qua Problem - what
is it that, in virtue of our pointing at something, makes it an act of
pointing at the thing, qua the thing. If I define a rabbit by pointing
at one, what counts as denoting all rabbits, and what counts merely as
ostensively defining fur, or legs, or DNA, or "moving gray patches in
one's visual field"?
Those who have read Quine's _Word and Object_ will recognise the Gavagai
example here. And I think the answer is that we must have some prior
beliefs in order to make sense of any act of definition - one of these
is that, no matter how fuzzy the set, if you "hit" the "right" part,
then you connect with all the other parts. It turns out (as Hume
predicted 250 years ago) that we are innately endowed with shared
associations for things. These days, cognitive scientists are uncovering
what these innate predispositions are.
So the "binary versus fuzzy" (itself a very binary distinction, n'est
pas?) argument is still live. And I think that it is worth noting that
Aristotle himself had a "the more and the less" conception of forms; a
given dog is more or less approaching the form of doggery. But a dog is
either a dog, or it is not. And this is still a live option in modern
logical analysis.
Ananda Gupta
I gave my love an emerose
Upon a summer's day
When all around us in the grove
The gavagai did play
'I've never seen a rose so green,'
my love did say to me.
'My dear,' I said
'It's only gred... green, until time t.'
Brian M. Scott
in news:1formqo.2f7g6h1g663poN%john.w...@bigpond.com in
talk.origins:
[...]
> Those who have read Quine's _Word and Object_ will
> recognise the Gavagai example here.
Or those who know it from linguistics. There's a fine recipe
for Gavagai with Peppers at
<http://www.kun.nl/phil/tfl/recipes/gavagai1.html>.
[...]
> So the "binary versus fuzzy" (itself a very binary
> distinction, n'est pas?)
Only in the trivial sense that there's a binary distinction
between 'equals 0' and 'does not equal 0': binary is merely an
extreme case of fuzzy.
[...]
Brian
eyelessgame
I didn't talk about "knowledge" at all. I said that science *works*
and gave examples. I don't care, for the purposes of this discussion,
whether science deals in the thing/concept that you call "knowledge"
or not -- that's the justification for rhetorically saying I "don't
care" what knowledge is. Science does stuff and the stuff it does
improves lives and allows us to predict and retrodict a great deal of
phenomena. That's what it is and that's *all* it is.
> How's this: folk medicine has for thousands if not hundreds of thousands
> of years enabled people to live in a host of difficult environments. So
> therefore it must be more correct than science.
>
> Disagree? Good. Now you are doing philosophy...
How is it "doing philosophy" to examine the methods of folk medicine,
examine its effects on real people, and compare them with the current
scientific methods, and *from that* conclude that people are more
often cured from a wider variety of afflictions by modern medicine
than by folk medicine?
You snuck the word "correct" in without defining it. Again, I don't
care what's "correct". Folk medicine is not able to cure people as
often from as wide a variety of afflictions as modern medicine is.
That's not philosophy, that's observed.
> > > Do you really think that questioning the basis on which
> > > we do know things is tantamount to complete epistemic nihilism? I have
> > > only ever met one such person, and he was psychologically disturbed.
> > > Every single teacher I ever had concerning epistemology was well aware
> > > that science works and that things behave consistently. But that still
> > > doesn't answer the questions raised, how do we know what we know? Nor
> > > does it explain how we must justify particular knowledge claims.
> > >
> > > There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> > > so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> > > part of the real world, have problems.
> >
> > Such as?
> >
> > Have you ever considered the idea that philosphy itself is built on an
> > inductive foundation? That is, the deductive reasoning which
> > philosophy prides itself on has been used all these thousands of years
> > because it works. That was the basic empirical discovery of the
> > Greeks. Logic works. That's an inductive truth.
> >
> > So when philosophy is so critical of induction and empiricism, it is
> > actually engaging in the dreaded (by philosophy) circularity of
> > thinking.
>
> "Philosophy" is not critical of anything. Philosophy is not a single
> agent capable of being critical or approving. There are philosophies -
> some of them are opposed to induction, some aren't. Some it's hard to
> tell.
And that doesn't bother you?
> I am an inductivist, and what's worse, a nativist inductivist. We do
> well at inductions because we are innately inductive cognitive machines.
> That is a *philosophical* position, and it has to be explored, explained
> and justified. You cannot merely *assert* it and say, "well, now, that's
> it for philosophy, eh?" If you do, then you are showing a complete lack
> of critical thinking. Nothing comes for free. The issue is not whether
> induction works, but *why*, and in what circumstances.
Induction works because the universe happens to be fundamentally
simple and thus predictable. I'm not asserting that, we observe that.
Why is it? THat's an interesting question, but the answer (if there's
one) is at the subatomic and cosmological levels, not at the
philosophical level.
Why we're *good* at induction is an easy question for evolutionary
biology to answer. *How* we're good at induction is something that's
rather harder, and for cognitive science to answer.
> That dismissive mindset would have meant that Boole, Frege, Tarski, and
> a host of other logicians should have stuck happily with Aristotelian
> syllogisms - after all, it worked just fine for everyone until the
> nineteenth century, so why change it? Forget Hilbert, forget Gödel,
> forget Turing.
They made fascinating progress in mathematics, a field which *is*
related to philosophy. I think you're misrepresenting my position.
"Why does induction work?" is a cool question to ask, but again, it
doesn't derail science that you have no satisfactory agreed-upon
answer to it; the fact is that it *does* work, like logic works, and
we proceed happily along and our predictions still match later
observations.
>
> Every answer to a conceptual problem raises novel problems. In the
> solving of them we make progress in philosophy, and often we find that
> some of the "solutions" have been explored, often fruitlessly, many
> times before. It is hubris to think that just because we now do science
> that we have somehow solved the classical problems of knowledge and
> logic.
Of course we have not solved them. But solving them is orthogonal to
what we do in science.
Philosophy may argue to a standstill, but that is a standstill
> that scientists as much as anybody else is committed to - at worst you
> have to make a choice; at best you might resolve some longstanding
> problems.
And the choices made are useful because they permit successful
prediction of outcomes.
> But mostly, scientists who dabble in this matter tend to be
> extremely naive and ignorant, and declare problems solved in ways that
> have deep flaws.
That's possibly true. Could you give examples?
> > > They result in absurdities, or
> > > they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know. If you are so
> > > blind as to think that logical consistency is a bad thing, then you are
> > > welcome to ignore it. Some of us think it matters. And frankly, fuck you
> > > too. I'm sick of people treating my discipline as bullshit on the same
> > > grounds that an Ed Conrad dismisses biology. The ignorant and arrogant
> > > have no better right to state verities out of their arse than do anybody
> > > else. You clearly do not understand thing one about Ockham's Razor, or
> > > induction.
> > > --
> >
> > For a while there I was worried that you were being ad hominem in your
> > reply. But Ananda Gupta in his followup post called your reply
> > "eloquent" and so set my mind at ease. ;o)
> >
> No, I was being deliberately, knowingly and forcefully ad hominem. Tit
> for tat, you see. Someone says I can fuck off, then I say they can. I
> get pissed off occasionaly at the anti-philosophy mindset, as if it was
> in any way different to the know-nothingness of creationism.
>
> Some philosophy sucks. I am the first to admit that. But it takes
> *years* to work through the complexities of any intellectual tradition,
> and those who think a few simplistic considerations somehow undercut the
> raison d'etre for an entire discipline are just being moronic. If you
> have criticisms of *anything* - theology, science, art, architecture,
> philosophy - you have to read the material first. It's basic
> intellectual honesty.
I admit to a lack of much experience in the matter. I've read
Bertrand Russell and summaries (ahem, yes) of many others. But people
who come into any scientific forum and say "you scientists don't know
what knowledge is" is insulting, and deserves to be insulted back.
> Of course we could just treat intellectual matters as tribal fights. I'm
> sure that the creationists would love that. Then we get to the point
> where conceptual problems are solved by whoever can get the biggest
> vote, or the largest army. I'll stick with a sense of rationality, if
> you don't mind.
I don't mind.
I have a question I am honestly interested in hearing answered, which
I'm sure qualifies as basic philosophy. What, to a philosopher of
Russell's tradition, would be the difference between a table that
"appears real to all tests, but is not real", and one which is "real"?
In other words, why does the former not imply the latter by
definition?
John Wilkins
> john.w...@bigpond.com (John Wilkins) wrote...
> > eyelessgame <aa...@oro.net> wrote:
> >
> > > Knowledge, smowledge. I don't really give a damn what you think
> > > "counts as knowledge" -- you can use the word any old way you want. I
> > > also don't give a damn whether philosophers can or can't cope with the
> > > fact that we know things to be more or less likely to be true based on
> > > the quantity and quality of evidence in their favor. We used this
> > > principle to hold up bridges, cure polio, build the Web, and put human
> > > beings on the moon. Epistomology says it doesn't work? Epistomology
> > > can go fuck itself; the rest of us have a real world here.
> > >
> > > eyelessgame (aa...@alumni.caltech.edu)
> >
> > I am consistently amazed that nonspecialists think that it is
> > self-evident that philosophy is just a waste of time, just like
> > creationists think it is self-evident that evolutionary biology is, and
> > for exactly the same reason.
>
> I do /not/ think it is a waste of time; I think it is a discipline
> that has far less to do with science than it thinks it does.
>
> At 3 AM when I wrote the post above, I failed to distinguish between
> the abstract (and interesting) pursuit of epistomology, and the
> "skeptic's (postmodernist) position" of essentially nihilism, which
> was what Anand was using to phrase an objection to scientific inquiry.
Ananda was not doing that, in my view. He (She?) was outlining the
issues to be dealt with in responding to the philosophical claims of
creationism. In case you haven't noticed, a common ploy of creationism
is to say that evolution isn't science because it isn't X, Y or Z. This
relies on a (usually incomplete or even way twisted) view of what
knowledge is in science. I have remarked before that creationism is a
kind of postmodernism. Ananda merely observed this in epistemological
terms.
>
> (By the way, if you follow a religion, do you think that the studies
> of members of other religions are a waste of time? If you aren't
> religious, do you think the study of religion is a waste of time? I'm
> not talking about the people who study what religion is, or the
> philosophical nature of it; I'm talking about the people who spend
> hours and hours in bible study or Koran reading, who attempt to
> discern the meaning behind every single biblical passage or every
> single Koran, or Book of Mormon, or whatever, claim. Aren't at least
> some of those people spending their lives self-deluded into thinking
> their interesting abstraction has a lot more to do with the real world
> than it actually does?)
I have no religion, but I have studied comparative religion - I am
human, nothing human is foreign to me (Seneca?). I also once did the
sort of Bible study you are talking about, and no, I think that this
functions as a cultural tradition-reinforcement activity. Since most of
what humans have had to adapt to is other humans, this is a real-world
activity.
>
> > Do you *really* think that epistemology is just some parlour game that
> > ignores reality? Do you really think that the extremely clever folk who
> > discuss these things don't know every single sophomoric objection you
> > have made here. Do you really think that questioning the basis on which
> > we do know things is tantamount to complete epistemic nihilism?
>
> No, and I failed to distinguish sufficiently between the general study
> of epistomology and the specific nihilistic/"skeptical"/postmodernist
> position being presented. But /as stated/, the position that "all
> evidence is meaningless without other evidence to back it up, ad
> infinitum" is a load of crap. I don't think you or any other
> intelligent person really espouses it, and this was the point I tried
> to make.
It is an issue to resolve. Once you ask for supporting evidence for
*any* single claim, you open up that chain of justification. If you need
to justify *one* claim, then prima facie you need to justify many, and
the question must arise - how much is necessary to justify?
For myself, I think that justification is not fully transitive. Others
think that entire belief systems need to be rationally justified, while
still others think that so long as a belief system is coherent, each
belief or proposition within the system is justified. So, what to
choose? It does not seem to me that it is crap to investigate this. This
is not to say that science must be held in abeyance until the matter is
resolved - even Hume said that when we have played a game or two such
matters seem gray and unreal, and we get on with life. Your deliberately
provocative attack on philosophy entire (which is what Ananda was
presenting an *introduction* to) is not ameliorated by backing down now
and saying, "ah, but it was *postmodernism* I was attacking". You were
clear enough the first time.
>
> I have
> > only ever met one such person, and he was psychologically disturbed.
> > Every single teacher I ever had concerning epistemology was well aware
> > that science works and that things behave consistently. But that still
> > doesn't answer the questions raised, how do we know what we know? Nor
> > does it explain how we must justify particular knowledge claims.
>
> And that's an interesting question. But it has nothing to do with
> actually learning the behavior of the universe, or of determining what
> has happened in the past -- which are scientific endeavors that might
> benefit from, but are in no way dependent on, investigating these
> abstract questions.
So now we *can* benefit from philosophy. I do wish you would either make
up your mind or retract your original attack. Epistemology is *all about
justifying knowledge claims*.
>
>
> > There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> > so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> > part of the real world, have problems. They result in absurdities, or
> > they lead to conclusions that undercuts what we do know.
>
> I am willing to be educated. Please give examples?
Okay. I don't have that post easily accessible now, so I tell you what -
you present the "common sense" view of knowledge, and we'll discuss each
issue in detail. I warn you, though, we will be doing philosophy.
Here's a freebie to begin with - if science relies on objective data,
how do we tell if the data are objective? How can we correctly
generalise from a limited data set?
>
>
> > If you are so
> > blind as to think that logical consistency is a bad thing, then you are
> > welcome to ignore it. Some of us think it matters. And frankly, fuck you
> > too.
>
> Logical consistency isn't at all a bad thing. And again, I'm willing
> to be educated.
>
> > I'm sick of people treating my discipline as bullshit on the same
> > grounds that an Ed Conrad dismisses biology. The ignorant and arrogant
> > have no better right to state verities out of their arse than do anybody
> > else.
>
> But statements like "science is impossible without understanding
> philosophy" don't help philosophers be taken seriously by scientists.
Who said this? Ananda didn't. Here is, from a saved copy, what he wrote:
--quote--
The purpose of this essay is to outline the basic issues in
epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Epistemological
questions include questions such as "Is there such thing as knowledge?",
"If there is knowledge, how do we acquire it?", and others. I believe
this is on topic because many of the postings in talk.origins have to do
with science, and epistemology is prior to science - after all, for
science to be worthwhile, it has to at least contribute to human
knowledge, and problems about human knowledge therefore go to the heart
of this newsgroup's topic.
--end quote--
If you read this carefully, you will see that the claim is that
epistemology is "prior" to science. This is necessarily true if science
is a knowledge-based enterprise or makes knowledge claims. If you claim
to have knowedge then you must, perforce, have an idea of what
constitutes knowledge. At no point in his (her?) post does Ananda say
what you say above. In short, you have constructed a classic strawman
argument.
I'll say it again so you are clear - *nobody* is saying that science is
not possible without understanding philosophy. Nobody. Not even the most
extreme philosophical skeptic. You are making it up.
>
> > You clearly do not understand thing one about Ockham's Razor, or
> > induction.
>
> I certainly can learn more than I know now. Tell me what was wrong
> with what I said, please.
Okay, what counts as "a more parsimonious theory"? How can you tell if a
theory is more parsimonious than another? Bayesian simplicity?
Algorithmic brevity? What makes an ontology, if ontological paucity is a
virtue? Why is it that *scientists* are so unclear on parsimony
analyses, if it is not a philosophical problem? Simply parroting
"Ockham's Razor" is not an answer to *anything*! For if you cannot
specify the action and use of the Razor (and whose formulation? Ockham
himself never gave the definitions used in the literature; the "do not
unnecessarily multiply entities in explanation" form was due to a later
writer), then what are you offering here? Just a brand name preference,
that's all.
And induction: you claimed IIRC that we commonly do make generalisations
from data, and we surely do, but that is not the issue - I can, like
Glendower, call universal statements from the vasty deep, but do they
apply when I do call for them? Lawlike statements are trivially easy to
generate, but the devil is in the testing, and it is not so easy to
define what coutns as testing, either. Popperian falsificationism has
been undercut *at the root* by the Duhem-Quine problem, so we need to
have reasons for limiting that if we are to test our generalisations.
Otherwise we *are* left with postmodern constructionism.
You cannot expect that just asserting things is in any way to rule out
these issues. And that is just what you did - "we don't need philosophy
because all this is obvious" (a paraphrase, not a quote). Well it isn't.
John Wilkins
> a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote...
> > darth_...@yahoo.com (darth_versive) wrote in
> > <8e0e3045.03011...@posting.google.com>:
> >
> > >> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
> > >>
> > >> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical
> > >> definition is: "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this
> > >> definition can be, and has been, improved upon. Now we have a
> > >> three-word definition of knowledge.
> > >
> > >For the sake of argument, I'll go along with this definition for now.
He did say it was "crude". I mentioned the classic counterexamples - the
Gettier cases. But this is an overfine distinction in this context.
> > >
> > >Traditional epistemology may consider "what is a belief?" to be
> > >something to be quickly defined away or deftly argued over, and then
> > >on to the "real business" of epistemology, but I do not.
?? Belief is treated as an element in the discussion of knowledge - but
it is further investigated elsewhere, particularly in the context of
propositional attitudes. We cannot discuss everything all at once. You
have to do it a step at a time.
> >
> > Certainly one would have to demonstrate a problem with the given
> > definition of a belief, which is a proposition thought to be true by
> > someone (the belief-holder). To me this definition seems unproblematic;
> > what's your objection to it?
>
> My objection to it is just what I wrote below: that it is a complex
> natural phenomenon which is not well understood, and needs further
> research within the sorts of fields that I mentioned below. If
> knowledge is "justified true belief," and "belief" is an undefined
> term, or a term defined arbitrarily or through clever argument, or one
> taken for granted in its common-sense meaning, then there's a problem.
> It's the problem of subjectivity. "What exactly is it?" and "How does
> it work?" are not topics that you can just bypass on the way to asking
> how to "justify" "true" "beliefs". Within the subjective
> understanding of most traditional epistemologists, this isn't a
> problem, since the definition of "belief" is not problematic, and the
> idea of subjectivivity itself as a natural phenomenon is not taken
> very seriously. But I would maintain that the process of defining
> words themselves, and the way words are defined within a given
> conceptual framework, is an integral part of the phenomenon of
> subjectivity itself that needs to be understood scientifically. So we
> have a clash of perspectives on the issue (which is itself also part
> of the phenomenon of subjectivity). See where I'm going with this?
Sure, you are experiencing a problem-shift. You begin with explicating
one thing (knowledge) in terms of another (belief) and find that you now
want to know what belief is. Fair enough. But that does not undermine
the need to continue to explicate the first term, even if we now have a
problem shift elsewhere. You are like a lawyer who cannot begin the
contract until all the terms are rigidly (and opaquely) defined. But
that is not possible even in the law. What Ananda did was enough to be
going on with.
It is an interesting question, what belief is. And it is investigated,
both in science and in philosophy (and science is the ammunition of
philosophy at times... we use the results of investigations when we can
to set up the further argument. In philosophy of mind, this goes back to
Descartes, although it was the Phineas Gage case that blew it all
apart). But we can still ask meaningful questions about what knowledge
is anyway.
>
> > > Beliefs,
> > >belief systems, conceptual frameworks, subjectivity, etc. are all
> > >natural phenomena which need to be understood scientifically (at least
> > >to a reasonable approximation) before we can go on to those issues
> > >which traditional epistemology sees as the "nuts and bolts" of this
> > >discipline (such as truth and justification, etc.).
> >
> > Suppose we do have a scientific understanding of the bits you mention above
> > (although I confess I have no idea what you mean by a scientific
> > understanding of e.g. the belief that it's raining). Presumably that
> > understanding is comprised of some allegedly well-supported propositions
> > about those things. But it still has gotten us nowhere because you haven't
> > offered an account of what it is for a proposition to be well-supported, or
> > what would be necessary and sufficient for us to *accept* these scientific
> > understandings. That's what I meant by saying epistemology is prior to
> > science; one must first have a view, implicit or not, about questions like
> > that, before one can even do science.
>
> And this is what I meant when I said that a naturalistic epistemology
> is not prior to science. Science is what it is, and using
> "well-supported propositions" or not, it makes discoveries. When it
> makes sufficient discoveries about the nature of beliefs and the
> nature of subjectivity, then naturalistic epistemology will have a
> solid foundation. Until then, it won't, and there's no use to try to
> answer questions about how to justifify true beliefs.
What possible reason do you have for saying *that*? Do you simply
*believe* that there's no use trying to answer questions about
justification, or do you have some justification of that answer to this
question?
Recursion, n. See "recursion"...
>
> But from a traditional epistemological perspective, this isn't the
> case, since before science can even *start* investigating the nature
> of beliefs, there will have to be an "account of what it is for a
> proposition to be well-supported." And this is precisely one of the
Strawman argument.
> Catch-22 mazes that traditional epistemology spins for itself which
> demonstrates (to me, anyway) that traditional epistemology doesn't
> work very well in the modern world of scientific thought, but is an
> anachronism better suited to the Ancient world or the Middle Ages (or
> academic philosophy departments, or philosophy journals, etc., where
> this way of thinking is preserved). In the probable case that you
> can't follow my reasoning on this, I'd just say that traditional
> epistemology leads to its own subjective perspective on this
> issue--which can be hard to break out of--and that in order to get my
> drift, you'd have to become more familiar with the mainstream
> scientific perspective on the world, and on scientific methodology
> itself, with hypotheses making sense of the available evidence, not
> comprised of "propositions which are well-supported" in a
> philosophical sense. For example, re-read the posts by "eyelessgame"
> in this thread about how scientific inference works in practice. But
> you could also talk to any number of practicing scientists.
And oddly, many epistemologists have done exactly that. And yet the
problems still don't go away.
>
> Sorry if this isn't very helpful, but that's the nature of beliefs,
> conceptual frameworks, and subjectivity--sometimes those with
> different perspectives can't understand each other very well because
> of the conceptual gulf between them. And sometimes more detailed
> explanations only serve to widen the gulf even more, rather than to
> bridge it. But that's the way it is.
>
So effectively you are saying, "this topic is too hard for us to answer,
so we shouldn't even try"? I don't buy that.
John Wilkins
John Wilkins
> wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote...
What do you mean by "science works"? Works how? What counts as success
in science? Where do *those* criteria come from? Are they culturally
determined, in which case why isn't the cultural bias of the mythical
sultan of Alexandria, who is supposed to have burned the Library because
all that was worth knowing is in the Q'uran, as good a criterion as that
of the west? And so on.
How do you evaluate science "improving our lives"? As in Bhopal, or the
Love Canal? How about the DDT chain in the fight against malaria in the
50s and 60s? Why don't *these* count against science then?
In short, how have you progressed beyond the classical *philosophical*
distinction of ends over means?
Look, I am not saying that these things undercut science - I clearly do
not think that they do. I am a modernist of the highest water, and
believe strongly that science can do what no other human endeavour could
ever do. But that is not what is at issue. The philosophical problems do
*not* evaporate because we are satisfied with our lot now we have
science. We still have questions to ask and explore, and they have to do
with how we know what we do, in fact, know. You assert (without very
much knowledge on the matter, as far as I can tell, although
darth_versive seems to have some familiarity with the topic) that we can
do without epistemology. Well, we can do without a lot of things; that
isn't conclusive - the question in my mind is whether we *want* to do
without epistemology.
As it happens, I think that epistemology fails to provide universally
correct, reliable, and useful rules. I think that *prescriptive*
epistemology is self-consuming. But I also think that about "science" or
the "scientific method". In the end, there is only what works according
to the local criteria for "fitness", and so a descriptive epistemology
is itself a kind of science. As Hull said, it had better comply with the
results of its own investigations. But still there are philosophical
problems, and although *I* don't think they are answerable by science or
philosophy, I do think they are important.
>
>
> > How's this: folk medicine has for thousands if not hundreds of thousands
> > of years enabled people to live in a host of difficult environments. So
> > therefore it must be more correct than science.
> >
> > Disagree? Good. Now you are doing philosophy...
>
> How is it "doing philosophy" to examine the methods of folk medicine,
> examine its effects on real people, and compare them with the current
> scientific methods, and *from that* conclude that people are more
> often cured from a wider variety of afflictions by modern medicine
> than by folk medicine?
What do you mean by "cured"? Brought to a state of health that suits the
western lifestyle or the hunter-gatherer lifestyle? Define "normal" as
opposed to pathogenic. Now tell me how all this falls out of a strictly
factual account of the relationship between host and pathogen. You
continually attempt to derive normative concepts from descriptive.
Once you grant the *philosophical* presumptions on which science (in
this case medicine) are based, *then* you can make some comparative
claims. But in fact, it is (as any cultural anthropologist will tell
you) often thought in the culture to be *more* important to ensure that
the person is free of "spiritual" malign influences than biological (in
fact, "biological" is not even a category in those cultures unless
imported from the west - it wasn't a western concept until around 1800
either). How can you argue against *that*?
Not always. A philosophy of art, or a philosophy of moral reasoning, or
a philosophy of style is not supposed to cover induction; that is a
technical problem of epistemology (although I have at least one
philosophy of art that does). Some supposed epistemologies, such as the
phenomenological movement of Husserl and followers, lack a discussion of
induction that is in any way clear - that bothers me. That is also why I
am not a great afficionado of those traditions.
There are "philosophies", like Randism, which are just laughable. Like
any discipline, philosophy has good and bad practitioners, and is
subject to fashions and fads and (forgive me) memetic engineering.
>
> > I am an inductivist, and what's worse, a nativist inductivist. We do
> > well at inductions because we are innately inductive cognitive machines.
> > That is a *philosophical* position, and it has to be explored, explained
> > and justified. You cannot merely *assert* it and say, "well, now, that's
> > it for philosophy, eh?" If you do, then you are showing a complete lack
> > of critical thinking. Nothing comes for free. The issue is not whether
> > induction works, but *why*, and in what circumstances.
>
> Induction works because the universe happens to be fundamentally
> simple and thus predictable. I'm not asserting that, we observe that.
We have only observed a small portion of the events in the universe. You
are making an inductive generalisation to support induction. In my
circles that is called a viciously circular argument.
> Why is it? THat's an interesting question, but the answer (if there's
> one) is at the subatomic and cosmological levels, not at the
> philosophical level.
Why? What prevents it being interesting and answerable in philosophical
terms?
>
> Why we're *good* at induction is an easy question for evolutionary
> biology to answer. *How* we're good at induction is something that's
> rather harder, and for cognitive science to answer.
But evolutionary theory tells us that what worked in the past will not
always work (Hume's principle, BTW), and moreover that what works is
almost certainly not optimal to the task (and so our inductions are
always less than perfect). Hence we need to justify our inductions....
where have I heard that before?
>
>
> > That dismissive mindset would have meant that Boole, Frege, Tarski, and
> > a host of other logicians should have stuck happily with Aristotelian
> > syllogisms - after all, it worked just fine for everyone until the
> > nineteenth century, so why change it? Forget Hilbert, forget Gödel,
> > forget Turing.
>
> They made fascinating progress in mathematics, a field which *is*
> related to philosophy. I think you're misrepresenting my position.
> "Why does induction work?" is a cool question to ask, but again, it
> doesn't derail science that you have no satisfactory agreed-upon
> answer to it; the fact is that it *does* work, like logic works, and
> we proceed happily along and our predictions still match later
> observations.
I didn't say it would. Ananda didn't say it would. You and darth have
erected a classical strawman, for the demolition of...
And I think you both overestimate how successful science really is in
its inductions. For every successful one, scores if not thousands of
inductive generalisations have failed. We are most successful at
inductions in an already-known domain.
>
> >
> > Every answer to a conceptual problem raises novel problems. In the
> > solving of them we make progress in philosophy, and often we find that
> > some of the "solutions" have been explored, often fruitlessly, many
> > times before. It is hubris to think that just because we now do science
> > that we have somehow solved the classical problems of knowledge and
> > logic.
>
> Of course we have not solved them. But solving them is orthogonal to
> what we do in science.
As I said, it's your strawman...
>
> Philosophy may argue to a standstill, but that is a standstill
> > that scientists as much as anybody else is committed to - at worst you
> > have to make a choice; at best you might resolve some longstanding
> > problems.
>
> And the choices made are useful because they permit successful
> prediction of outcomes.
>
> > But mostly, scientists who dabble in this matter tend to be
> > extremely naive and ignorant, and declare problems solved in ways that
> > have deep flaws.
>
> That's possibly true. Could you give examples?
Well one that is close to home is Macfarlane Burnet, who was the guy who
worked out the clonal selection theory of immunology. He wrote an
absolutely embarrassing tome on social problems that ended up proposing
genetic eugenics. Another is Charles Birch, a biologist who fancies
himself a theologian if memory serves. He argues for a teleological view
of biology.
On epistemology, Einstein did OK, although his ideas are not a
full-formed philosophy of knowledge, and he was indebted to the Kantian
tradition over the positivism of Mach. But apart from Donald Campbell (a
psychologist) I am not aware of any major scientific contribution to
epistemological discussion. There are plenty of minor ones. Some are
better than others, but where they are original, I find them flawed.
Ernst Mayr's contributions are little more than assertions derived from
his view of Popper. The Popperians in the cladistic revolution, such as
Farris and Wiley, show that they do not understand Popper any more than
he understood biology. Stephen Pinker is Locke revisited, as is Jody
Hey's recent book on species. Richard Lewontin is a great biologist and
a lousy philosopher - his "dialectics" of biology (with Lewin) is very
rough and ready, and, like a lot of what you are saying, assumes
conclusions still in contention.
Dawkins is better as a philosopher, but his ideas are at best
question-begging (genes as information? Really...) although one thing
about him is that he inspires philosophers to do some interesting work.
Maynard Smith is great until he gets to philosophy, although I find his
non-scientific ideas thought-provoking as well (if only as in, "now, how
am I going to refute this?"). The classical example of bad epistemology
from a scientist is, of course, Ernst Haeckel.
Russell is a century ago. Have you read anything more recent?
And, just for the record, once and for all, *who* said scientists do not
know what knowledge is? Any more than, say, philosophers?
>
> > Of course we could just treat intellectual matters as tribal fights. I'm
> > sure that the creationists would love that. Then we get to the point
> > where conceptual problems are solved by whoever can get the biggest
> > vote, or the largest army. I'll stick with a sense of rationality, if
> > you don't mind.
>
> I don't mind.
>
> I have a question I am honestly interested in hearing answered, which
> I'm sure qualifies as basic philosophy. What, to a philosopher of
> Russell's tradition, would be the difference between a table that
> "appears real to all tests, but is not real", and one which is "real"?
> In other words, why does the former not imply the latter by
> definition?
Russell during which period? The logical atomist Russell or the radical
empiricist Russell? Anyway, Wittgenstein answered that in his latter
period - if the language game proceeds the same way, there is no
difference at all. CS Peirce gave effectively the same answer 70 years
before that, and Hume something sort of like it 100 years earlier still.
And "real" is different from "known" or "knowable". There are several
sense of "real"; the one I most like is effectively the pragmatist one -
if it makes a difference, it's real. But in Quine's terms, "to be is to
be the value of a bound variable"; that is, in your broadest set of best
theories about the world, it's real if it's required by that set of
theories. Others, like Putnam, take something to be real *only* if it is
required by the theory - this is called internal realism. The idea that
all entities of some *ideal* science are real is called scientific
realism. Pay your money and take your choice...
eyelessgame
>
> > John Wilkins wrote:
> > >
> > > Do you *really* think that epistemology is just some parlour game that
> > > ignores reality? Do you really think that the extremely clever folk who
> > > discuss these things don't know every single sophomoric objection you
> > > have made here.
> >
> > I, for one, would like to hear some rebuttals to these objections. I
> > didn't think the objections were all that sophomoric.
>
> Let's see... gosh we can solve some problems so all knowledge is
> scientific? That's not sophomoric?
But that wasn't my objection at all. Perhaps you misunderstood what I
wrote; that wouldn't have been hard to do (for one thing, I kept
saying "philosophers" when I meant "postmodernists"). I don't know,
or care, what your definition of "knowledge" is, or whether I have
all, some, or any. I'm saying that "scientific knowledge" is that set
of statements that, as far as we can measure, match phenomena in the
real world. Is that somehow a sophomoric objection to philosophy? If
so, can you elaborate?
> How's this: folk medicine has for thousands if not hundreds of thousands
> of years enabled people to live in a host of difficult environments. So
> therefore it must be more correct than science.
>
> Disagree? Good. Now you are doing philosophy...
In my earlier message I described one possible scientific response.
Was it "philosophy" to do so? I guess my problem is I haven't heard a
definition of what "philosophy" is -- something you no doubt know very
well, but I must admit to confusion on the question. I call my
response to it science. Perhaps by "proper" definitions it's both?
> > > There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> > > so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> > > part of the real world, have problems.
> >
> > Such as?
> >
> > Have you ever considered the idea that philosphy itself is built on an
> > inductive foundation? That is, the deductive reasoning which
> > philosophy prides itself on has been used all these thousands of years
> > because it works. That was the basic empirical discovery of the
> > Greeks. Logic works. That's an inductive truth.
> >
> > So when philosophy is so critical of induction and empiricism, it is
> > actually engaging in the dreaded (by philosophy) circularity of
> > thinking.
>
> "Philosophy" is not critical of anything. Philosophy is not a single
> agent capable of being critical or approving. There are philosophies -
> some of them are opposed to induction, some aren't. Some it's hard to
> tell.
Some philosophies are opposed to induction? They don't accomplish
much, I take it.
I think you avoided the question, though. Is not philosophy built on
an inductive foundation? Can it criticize induction without
undermining itself?
And on a related topic, is it somehow philosophically ignorant to say
that the validity of induction is an observed condition of the cosmos,
and proceed with scientific inquiry on that basis?
> I am an inductivist, and what's worse, a nativist inductivist. We do
> well at inductions because we are innately inductive cognitive machines.
> That is a *philosophical* position, and it has to be explored, explained
> and justified. You cannot merely *assert* it and say, "well, now, that's
> it for philosophy, eh?" If you do, then you are showing a complete lack
> of critical thinking. Nothing comes for free. The issue is not whether
> induction works, but *why*, and in what circumstances.
And when my answer is "the reason induction works is that the universe
has a level of fundamental simplicity", why is that a sophomoric
objection to philosophy? AFAICT it is an answer to the question that
is good enough for science, whether it answers the questions
philosophers ask or not.
This thread was based on the use of philosophy to object to scientific
discovery. I don't think it has a leg to stand on when it does.
> That dismissive mindset would have meant that Boole, Frege, Tarski, and
> a host of other logicians should have stuck happily with Aristotelian
> syllogisms - after all, it worked just fine for everyone until the
> nineteenth century, so why change it? Forget Hilbert, forget Gödel,
> forget Turing.
I don't think I was objecting to the work of any of them, but perhaps
you can show me where I was. I was saying that the definitions of
knowledge, fact, truth, induction, etc. that science uses are
appropriate to the task of doing science (and it happens that the
definitions are neither hard nor deep).
> No, I was being deliberately, knowingly and forcefully ad hominem. Tit
> for tat, you see. Someone says I can fuck off, then I say they can. I
> get pissed off occasionaly at the anti-philosophy mindset, as if it was
> in any way different to the know-nothingness of creationism.
>
> Some philosophy sucks. I am the first to admit that.
(Side question: how does one tell that a given philosophy sucks?
Under what conditions is a formerly favored philosophy abandoned?)
> But it takes
> *years* to work through the complexities of any intellectual tradition,
> and those who think a few simplistic considerations somehow undercut the
> raison d'etre for an entire discipline are just being moronic. If you
> have criticisms of *anything* - theology, science, art, architecture,
> philosophy - you have to read the material first. It's basic
> intellectual honesty.
I should not have criticized "philosophers"; I should have limited my
objections to the know-nothing postmodernists whose arguments were
being described originally.
> Of course we could just treat intellectual matters as tribal fights. I'm
> sure that the creationists would love that. Then we get to the point
> where conceptual problems are solved by whoever can get the biggest
> vote, or the largest army. I'll stick with a sense of rationality, if
> you don't mind.
Again, that's very very different from what I said. Dkomo said
something similar, and I objected to it. Reality is not based on
consensus. It is not necessarily the case that we successfully
understand reality -- the only way we can tell whether we do (or, more
accurately, whether we understand something /similar/ to reality) is
to test it and observe the result. Do you know of another way? I
would be *very* interested in hearing.
eyelessgame
Brian M. Scott
No, it's a different approach entirely. But it sounds entirely
reasonable both as an abstract model to be investigated and as at
least a first-order description of the way belief actually works
(especially if you allow for the possibility of disconnected
webs!).
Brian
David Ewan Kahana
> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>
An excellent essay, which succeeds in its purpose. Thanks for your
efforts. I have some questions and some observations.
> The purpose of this essay is to outline the basic issues in
> epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Epistemological
> questions include questions such as "Is there such thing as
> knowledge?",
If the answer to this question is no, then epistemology appears to be
the study of a non-existent thing, according to the given definition.
Can a field of study question the existence of the subject of the
field of study? Is it possible that an epistemologist considers this
question for a long time, makes an irrefutable argument leading to the
answer `no,' and then stays silent for the rest of time?
If he behaves like the skeptic you described below and tries to
generate an infinite regress, then no one will tolerate it very long.
In either case, the skeptic is excluded from the discussion.
It seems, of course, that the answer to the question can be `no', if
one regards epistemology purely as a language game, or as a kind of
mathematics. But if epistemological propositions are to be tied to
something in the world, if we believe that they may express something
that can be shown to be the case, do we not have to believe it
justified and true that knowledge in some form exists?
We may certainly question what the word `knowledge' means, but at
least the existence of the word cannot be regarded as an
accident. This word strives to describe something.
So the question, at least, appears to me to be a meta-epistemological
question, your demonstration following Huemer that the skeptic forces
us to consider something important about the consistency of a proposed
set of apparently reasonable axioms of the theory of knowledge
notwithstanding.
> "If there is knowledge, how do we acquire it?", and others.
Questions of that sort can belong to epistemology as defined.
> I believe
> this is on topic because many of the postings in talk.origins have to do
> with science, and epistemology is prior to science - after all, for
> science to be worthwhile, it has to at least contribute to human
> knowledge, and problems about human knowledge therefore go to the heart
> of this newsgroup's topic.
>
It is commonplace to speak loosely of orderings of fields of study,
so: `mathematics is prior to physics, physics is prior to chemistry,
chemistry is prior to chemical engineering.' A relationship of logical
dependence of the later fields of study in the ordering on the earlier
is implied. But it is less than clear that this is an accurate way of
speaking, except in a very specific and well-delimited fashion. The
relationships may be more complex, I suppose.
One may accept that there may be such linear relationships of
dependency between fields of study, but one may also not. One might
argue that there was little knowledge before science (given a very
narrow definition of knowledge, and a very broad definition of
science). One might argue at least that science, broadly defined, has
provided at least some of the interesting raw material with which
epistemology must work. Some surprising propositions which we commonly
call knowledge have been demonstrated by activities we might call
science, such as: `Mixing red and green light makes yellow
light. Mixing red and green paint does not make yellow paint.'
If one does not accept a linear, or a purely branched ordering of
different fields of study, then is it not equally possible that
science, to the extent that it is not simply a field of study, is in
some ways prior to epistemology?
Also, is it not possible that science is worthwhile whether or not it
contributes to human knowledge as you have defined it below?
Doing science, after all, is a human way of behaving. First and
foremost it implies a certain way of acting in the world, with respect
to learning about certain aspects of the world. There may be other
ways of determining the `worthwhile-ness' of a way of behaving than by
measuring what it contributes to human knowledge. Would one deny that
music, art, theology or doing cross-word puzzles are worthwhile
activities because one found that they failed to contribute to human
knowledge?
I do agree that problems of human knowledge go to the heart of this
newsgroup's topic.
> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
>
> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical definition
> is: "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this definition can
> be, and has been, improved upon. Now we have a three-word definition of
> knowledge.
>
This appears to be a static definition of knowledge, and you proceed
to define belief purely with respect to propositions, so you also
define knowledge purely with respect to propositions.
It may be, and I don't deny it here, that it is useful to proceed
using this definition. Having some such definition does appear to be
necessary to defining the field of epistemology. But the area of
inquiry will be limited, for better or for worse, depending on the
choice of the definition.
The definition employs two abstract nouns, and the past tense of an
abstract verb. The two words `justified' and `true' denote
qualifications that one may apply to sentences, or to propositions,
which are in and of themselves purely linguistic constructs. The word
`belief' commonly denotes a mental state relative to a proposition
which, I presume, is different than the mental state commonly denoted
by `knowledge'.
I am not sure whether belief is actually prior to knowledge, so I
worry that there may be some circularity in the definition.
Now it's true, one must stop somewhere in the procedure of defining
terms. But I do worry because in common parlance, the distinction
between `to believe' and `to know' is quite often blurred.
If someone says:
`I believe that GW Bush has been elected President of the US. I know
that GW Bush has been elected President of the US.'
then we probably understand him. But if he had said:
`I don't believe that GW Bush has been elected President of the
US. I know that GW Bush has been elected President of the US.'
then we also likely understand him, especially if can we hear the
prosody and the tone of voice, and then the meaning is quite
different. There is surely equivocation on the meaning of the word
`belief' in the above example, but are we sure that that equivocation
does not include some parcel of truth with respect to the mental
states which belief, and knowledge denote. Are these pure and distinct
mental states?
With respect to what I called the static nature of the definition, I
am reminded of a quotation I think is attributed to Einstein.
Pointing at a shelf full of physics books, he said:
`That is physics. I am a physicist.'
His meaning, it seemed to me, was clear. The books contained physics:
the summary in technical language of arguments, theories and data. In
other words, large collections of propositions. He points out that he
is the physicist, the one who acts to produce the texts. The action of
doing physics is prior to the distilled and static result of the
action, contained and summarized in texts.
It may also be this way with knowledge. It may be that there is a
mental state of knowing with respect to some proposition which is only
produced in the act of demonstrating that a proposition has the
properties of being a justified, true belief: that we only know things
in showing them or pointing to them. At the very least we must be able
to imagine showing them or pointing to them or to be able to say that
someone has done that, or to recall having done that, in which case
there exists either a precursor or shadow of the mental state of
knowing, or the recollection of that mental state.
In this view, there would exist among all possible propositions a
certain subset of propositions that we can say we know, and these
would constitute `knowledge.' Knowledge would be a set of propositions
which we could list in some static text.
The process of acquiring knowledge would be one of digging among
propositions, constructing many of them, and considering which among
the interesting ones satisfied the qualifications you presented for
being known propositions. The pile of propositions that we
collectively know, could be called human knowledge. Science, or
creationism, you would say, is worthwhile if it contributes to
building the pile of the known propositions higher.
But if I were correct, and there is a dynamic component to knowledge,
then one might take a quite different view. One might say that the act
of demonstrating propositions is the worthwhile thing, for it is that
act which produces the mental state of knowledge in the maximum number
of people.
There are also non-propositional mental constructs, which are, of
course, left out of epistemology as you have defined it. Language is
one function of the brain, but it is not all of its functions.
People with undamaged brains will react in stereotypical fashion when
from a standing position, they are pushed, lose their balance and
begin to fall. Does this capability constitute something we can call
knowledge?
This capability is not linguistically encoded, it is not even encoded,
as I understand it, in the cerebral cortex.
If I walk to the edge of a very high cliff and look over it, there
will be a very strong tendency for me to step back from the edge, and
not to step over it. This is an automatic reaction to the visual image
which takes place inside me, though to be sure I could choose to
overcome this reaction and step into the void. Does this tendency not
constitute a kind of knowledge?
This capability requires, I think, some non-trivial visual processing
and is thus partly in the cerebral cortex, but it is not
linguistically encoded.
Both tendencies are present in pre-verbal humans, and there are many
other such examples.
Most of us are capable of learning crawling, walking and running.
A figure skater may be capable of doing a triple Axel jump, or a back
flip. Does this ability not constitute a kind of knowledge?
It is certainly a true proposition that `I don't know how to do a
triple Axel jump, nor even how to do a single Axel.' Yet, expert
figure skaters have communicated to me how to do a single toe loop, a
Salchow, a flip, and a loop jump, as well as how to do an Axel. I
could describe what has to be done in each case. And after practice,
and further instruction, I am quite able to do the easier single
revolution jumps, but on attempting the Axel, I always fall. When I
think about it, I believe that I learned these things in much the same
way as I learned to do calculus, or, after a fashion, to play the
piano.
These abilities, it seems to me, can also quite reasonably be called
knowledge. It is not the technical definition that you are trying to
present, but I wonder if the technical definition is really
sufficient.
One may raise the objection that the physical abilities I listed are
all fundamentally different in kind from the ability, say, to express
the volume of a hypersphere in n-dimensional space in closed
mathematical form, or that doing physics is a very different activity
in kind than doing a triple Axel.
I am not sure to what extent this objection is sound, I certainly
believe it is sound to some extent. But since language has purely
physical aspects as well as apparently allowing for symbolic
representational ones, I am not so sure that the differences are as
large as they may appear.
I guess that I am questioning whether the static, truth propositional
definition of knowledge which you express very well below, is
sufficient, or whether it is necessary to be more general in the
description.
> First let's start with "belief". What's a belief? A belief is a
> proposition that a person accepts as true. It is possible to have false
> beliefs; for example, if I believe that I am Napoleon Bonaparte, that
> would be a false belief (even though I think it's true). It would be
> absurd if someone were to say that he believes something yet knows that
> belief to be false, e.g. "It is raining outside, but I don't believe
> that it is raining outside." That is not a formal contradiction, but it
> is a very odd thing to say.
>
> Now for "true". What is it for a proposition to be true? Aristotle put
> it most simply: "To say of what is, that it is not, and of what is not,
> that it is, is false, while to say of what is, that it is, and of what
> is not, that it is not, is true." That is, a true proposition agrees
> with the facts of reality it describes, and a false proposition does
> not.
>
> And now for "justified", the most controversial of the three parts of
> the definition of knowledge. What is it for a proposition to be
> justified? Suppose I were to say that I believe it is raining outside.
> What might justify that proposition? One way to justify it would be to
> base it on another proposition: "When I opened the window, I saw drops
> of water falling from the sky and people walking around with umbrellas."
> So, a proposition can be justified based on another proposition,
> provided the latter provides some sort of reason for believing the
> former. If I were to justify my belief that it is raining outside by
> saying, "Well, I flipped a coin, having decided that if it came up heads
> it would be raining outside and if it came up tails, it would not be
> raining," that doesn't seem to be a very good justification. It doesn't
> provide a reason for believing the initial proposition, that it is
> raining outside. Note that the issue of justification and the issue of
> truth are separate: suppose I did in fact flip a coin, and it came up
> heads, and I therefore adopted the belief that it was raining outside.
> And suppose it actually was raining outside. Then my belief that it was
> raining outside is true, but not justified, and hence does not count as
> knowledge.
>
To me, this seems to be a problematic discussion of justification, and
just possibly a circular definition of knowledge.
Implicit in your discussion is that in the second case, if one adopted
the belief that it is raining outside on the basis of the coin flip,
then one would have a very different mental state with respect to the
proposition than if one had adopted the proposition on the basis of
direct observations out of the window.
By your propositional definition of belief, the mental state is of
course, irrelevant, all that is relevant is the truth value assigned
to the proposition. If the value is true, it then becomes a
belief. But for most people the perception of the belief will be different
in the two cases. The difference, the reason why I imagine you say
that one procedure provides a good justification and the other does
not is that we all have prior knowledge of how coins behave, or
rather, in this case, we have a prior belief that the particular coin
that was flipped behaves as many coins have been observed to do,
namely that they come up heads or tails pretty much equally often when
tossed, whether it is raining outside or not, so that our assignment
of the truth values under this procedure may just as well be `I
believe that the proposition `it is raining outside' is heads.' Or `I
believe that the proposition `it is raining outside' is tails.'
The difficulty has actually come in earlier, I think, with the
definition of truth you took from Aristotle. I am not sure that the
issues of truth and of justification can be separated in the way that
you say they can. For in the definition it was required, it was
implicit, that we can check what is and what is not. There must be
some direct access to the world of facts, or else the truth values of
a proposition cannot be assigned. So also at this point, action,
dynamics enters into the game.
One may well be equally well satisfied with the belief that it is
raining outside on the basis of the coin flip, if one has prior
knowledge, say, that it rains 50% of the time in the part of the world
in which the room is located, and if one is not capable of opening the
window to check, and if one does not have to go outside.
As long as epistemology remains only a language game, it may not
matter. It seems to me that we can separate the assignment of truth
values to propositions and the justification of them, as you do. You
are after all only laying down the rules of the game.
But if there is to be access and correspondence of known propositions
(knowledge) to the world of facts, then the two processes of defining
the truth values and of justifying the propositions may be of
necessity entangled.
> II. THE SKEPTIC
>
> First a distinction. A "skeptic", in common parlance, is a person who
> questions what he sees and reads, who demands evidence for assertions he
> finds implausible, and who thinks carefully before accepting new ideas.
> In epistemology, a skeptic is one who believes that people cannot know
> anything at all. I will be using the word "skeptic" in the technical,
> that is to say the latter, sense.
>
> For the skeptic to deny the existence of knowledge, using the definition
> of knowledge given above, he must deny that any beliefs fit that
> definition. That is, he must show that no beliefs are both true and
> justified. It is difficult for him to show that no beliefs are true;
> certainly he thinks his own belief that there is no such thing as
> knowledge is true, so he runs into a logical problem if he denies that.
> (Moreover, since the negation of a true belief is still a belief, if the
> skeptic were to show that all beliefs are false, he'd have shown that
> all their negations are true.) Therefore the traditional skeptic
> questions that any beliefs are in fact justified. Typically this takes
> the form of an infinite regress argument. In dialogue, here is how it
> goes. A is a non-skeptic; S is the skeptic.
>
> A: I believe that X.
> S: What's your reason for believing X? A: I also believe Y, and Y
> provides reason for believing X. S: Oh. Okay, what's your reason for
> believing Y? A: I also believe Z, and Z provides a reason to believe Y.
> S: Okay, what's your reason for believing Z? .... ad infinitum.
>
> You can see that this is a problem because X is justified because of Y,
> and Y is justified because of Z, and so forth, yet the chain of
> justification never ends. Unfortunately for the non-skeptic, humans
> have vast but nonetheless limited brainpower, and no one can hold an
> infinite number of beliefs. Therefore, if each person has a finite
> number of beliefs, yet justification for any belief requires an infinite
> sequence of other beliefs, then no person has any justified beliefs. And
> since only justified beliefs count as knowledge, then no person has any
> knowledge.
>
> The philosopher Michael Huemer (whose specialty is in this area,
> incidentally; his home page is home.sprynet.com/~owl1) states the
> problem very succinctly, thus:
>
> 1. In order to be justified in believing that P, one must have a reason
> for it.
> 2. That reason must also be justified. 3. There can't be an infinite
> regress of justification for P. 4. P can't be justified by circular
> reasoning. 5. People have justified beliefs.
>
> These propositions all seem plausible, but they cannot all be true (they
> are "jointly inconsistent", as Huemer puts it). Therefore one must be
> rejected for one's theory of knowledge to be consistent.
>
> Skeptics solve the inconsistency by rejecting #5, as explained above. A
> school of thought called "coherentism" rejects #4, claiming that some,
> not all, kinds of circular reasoning do in fact count as justification.
> A third school of thought, "foundationalism", rejects #1 (for some, not
> all, instances of P).
>
> I am not going to go into the merits of these solutions here - all have
> their critics.
>
What do epistemologists generally say about the existence of skeptics?
Are there really any of them, in the above sense? Or are they only
hypothetical? ;->
> III. TALK.ORIGINS
>
> The debate between creationism and evolutionary theory is a scientific
> one, although questions of what counts as science often crop up. The
> preceding essay may have more to do with the debate between atheism and
> theism, which bears certain similarities to the creation/evolution
> dispute. In particular, both disputes often involve appeals to evidence
> as justification for belief in a god, or for acceptance of a particular
> scientific theory. What epistemology points out is that, unless one is
> careful to establish exactly what is required for a belief to be
> justified, appeals to evidence can lead one to skepticism, and of course
> skepticism would entail that people are justified in believing neither
> creationism nor evolutionary theory. And that, in turn, may lead to a
> simple yet unattractive argument:
>
> 1. Either (some form of) creationism is true or (some form of)
> evolutionary theory is true.
> 2. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then skepticism is
> true. 3. Skepticism is false.
> 4. Therefore, (that form of) evolutionary theory is false. 5. Therefore,
> creationism is true.
>
> The tricky premise is of course #2 (#1 has its problems as well, but
> I've tried to state it as generally as possible to encompass all
> possibilities except some weird hybrid theory). One might argue for #2
> as follows:
>
> a. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then all beliefs can
> be justified only by appeal to evidence supporting them. b. That
> evidence must also be justified by appeal to further evidence. c. There
> can't be an infinite regress of evidence. d. Nor can there be circular
> justifications involving evidence. e. Therefore, if (that form of)
> evolutionary theory is true, no beliefs are justified. f. Skepticism =
> the view that no beliefs are justified. 2. Therefore, if (that form of)
> evolutionary theory is true, then skepticism is true.
>
> That, in a nutshell, is what I see as the relevance of epistemology to
> what we are talking about in this newsgroup. Obviously this is not a
> philosophy newsgroup, but I think it is important to be clear about
> those views one holds (implicitly or not) that are prior to science,
> because they have a way of trickling in and leaving a stain.
The nub of your argument above appears to be that one must be careful
to establish exactly what is required for a belief to be justified. I
would certainly not deny that, though I am not certain fully how to do
it. I have an idea of how it is done in practice, but rather doubt I
am capable of laying it all out.
Thank you again for an interesting essay, and I hope that you will
correct any trivial errors I may have made here. I am not a specialist
in epistemology.
Cheers!
David
dkomo
[snip top]
> I have a question I am honestly interested in hearing answered, which
> > I'm sure qualifies as basic philosophy. What, to a philosopher of
> > Russell's tradition, would be the difference between a table that
> > "appears real to all tests, but is not real", and one which is "real"?
> > In other words, why does the former not imply the latter by
> > definition?
>
> Russell during which period? The logical atomist Russell or the radical
> empiricist Russell? Anyway, Wittgenstein answered that in his latter
> period - if the language game proceeds the same way, there is no
> difference at all. CS Peirce gave effectively the same answer 70 years
> before that, and Hume something sort of like it 100 years earlier still.
>
> And "real" is different from "known" or "knowable". There are several
> sense of "real"; the one I most like is effectively the pragmatist one -
> if it makes a difference, it's real. But in Quine's terms, "to be is to
> be the value of a bound variable"; that is, in your broadest set of best
> theories about the world, it's real if it's required by that set of
> theories. Others, like Putnam, take something to be real *only* if it is
> required by the theory - this is called internal realism. The idea that
> all entities of some *ideal* science are real is called scientific
> realism. Pay your money and take your choice...
> --
What is "real" is a question of great interest to me. I would humbly
suggest that there is no single "reality". Rather there are a great
multiplicity of realities, something you've illustrated in what you
wrote above. What each reality looks like depends on the filter
through which you view it, or the map you use to describe it. A
reality seen through a blue filter is a blue reality. A reality seen
through a red filter is a red reality.
Futhermore, the realities you mentioned are *abstract* realities.
These are the kinds of realities described by science and philosophy.
They are "thought-about" realities. The everyday world which we
normally encounter when we're not thinking *about* it is a different
type of reality yet.
I got into a brief exchange with Ken Cope in a previous thread over a
statement I made about the physical world being a constructed
cognitive map. I pointed out that the picture that physics has of
reality has changed radically from what it was in the 19th century
after we moved into quantum mechanics and special and general
relativity. I asked, rhetorically, does anyone really believe that
spacetime *exists* as a concrete physical manifestation or that all
particles of matter are built up from the different modes of
vibrations of infinitesimal vibrating strings.
He answered (and I'm paraphrasing here) that regardless of whether the
curvature of spacetime (whatever that is) produced by massive objects
as described in general relativity actually occurs or is only a
concept that exists in our minds, he still puts his pants on one leg
at a time.
And I agree. So do I. But we're talking about two totally different
realities here: everyday reality and the abstract reality (realities)
described by modern physics.
Neil W Rickert
>We may certainly question what the word `knowledge' means, but at
>least the existence of the word cannot be regarded as an
>accident. This word strives to describe something.
What does "phlogiston" describe?
What does "unicorn" describe?
Neil W Rickert
>wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote in message news:<1foq1v0.1jnjjihpmsnhnN%wil...@wehi.edu.au>...
>> I am an inductivist, and what's worse, a nativist inductivist.
That's better, not worse. At least you recognize that inductivism,
if it were to work, would require innate knowledge of some form.
>> We do
>> well at inductions because we are innately inductive cognitive machines.
I don't see the evidence that we do well at inductions.
We are describable as doing well at inductions, but only because
people choose to describe things as if induction had been used.
>> That is a *philosophical* position, and it has to be explored, explained
>> and justified. You cannot merely *assert* it and say, "well, now, that's
>> it for philosophy, eh?" If you do, then you are showing a complete lack
>> of critical thinking. Nothing comes for free. The issue is not whether
>> induction works, but *why*, and in what circumstances.
>Induction works because the universe happens to be fundamentally
>simple and thus predictable.
To the contrary, induction does not work. And it does not work
because the universe happens to be fundamentally complex and
unpredictable.
> I'm not asserting that, we observe that.
We must live in different universes. In the universe I live in the
fate of the Titanic was not predicted, the attack on the World Trade
center was not predicted, when the U.S. economy will turn around
cannot be predicted, what the weather will be two weeks from today
cannot be predicted.
> Why is it? THat's an interesting question, but the answer (if there's
>one) is at the subatomic and cosmological levels, not at the
>philosophical level.
>Why we're *good* at induction is an easy question for evolutionary
>biology to answer.
Indeed, evolutionary biology is very good at coming up with "Just So"
stories.
> *How* we're good at induction is something that's
>rather harder, and for cognitive science to answer.
If you cannot answer the "how" question, you should be skeptical of
your answer to the "why" question.
Mark Isaak
(John Wilkins) wrote:
>The vagueness problem is a long-standing one, and I think that the
>fuzziness proponents are being a bit too easy with it. Sets are often
>*clustered*, with no sharp boundary, but for any cluster you can draw a
>boundary where all members are in it. The issue is when you cannot do
>this without including non-members, like trying to include only kidney
>cells but not vascular cells in a surgical excision).
>
>Fuzzy sets themselves come as continuous curves with no sharp
>boundaries, but with a minumum point that can non-arbitrarily act as the
>demarcation point. In this respect they are effectively statistical
>populations.
>
>But all this does not resolve the matter. We can often tell by looking
>at such sets where the boundary is, but when it comes to rigorous ways
>to recognise it, we cannot. Hence, some believe that even the fuzziest
>of sets, if it is a set at all, must be a matter of inclusion or
>exclusion; one cannot be partly in and partly out. [...]
I think one can, with sufficient effort, define sets so that they are
never fuzzy. If you are 48.000 inches tall, you are a dwarf; if you
are 48.001 inches tall, you are not. At 23:59:59 of a certain day,
you are a minor; at midnight you are an adult. Society makes
distinctions like this all the time for legal reasons. The problem
is, such distinctions are artificial. A height difference of 0.001
inches or an age different of one second does not make one into a
different kind of person. If people want a way to describe reality,
they need a language that reflects the reality.
Natural languages aren't great at capturing that reality; they almost
always lead us to say that "X is a Y", not "X is sort of a Y, but not
entirely". I suspect that a big part of the reason for this is
because the human brain is hardwired to make us think of things in
such terms. (As an aside, I believe that courses in psychology should
be required as part of any serious philosophy curriculum.) As you
note, scientists often deal with it statistically, but there are still
plenty of cases where it would be wise to recognize that the concepts
are fuzzy. (The definition of species is a notorious example.)
It should also be noted that fuzziness can come from other sources
besides variation of the set members. Off the top of my head,
fuzziness can also come from (1) uncertainty in our knowledge about
the set members, (2) subjectivity, and/or (3) poor definition of the
set. These kinds of fuzziness should at least be recognized and
usually considered separately. Do philosophers do that already?
Ananda Gupta
>Ananda was not doing that, in my view. He (She?) was outlining the
>issues to be dealt with in responding to the philosophical claims of
>creationism.
He. :)
The rest of your post is pretty much bang on with respect to what I was
trying to accomplish. It was essentially an attempt to point out some
traps -- if one makes claim A to respond to creationism (e.g. "Creationism
is unjustified because there is no evidence to support it") then one must
also be careful about other things claim A commits one to (e.g. the example
claim suggests that we need evidence to justify *all* our beliefs). But
you already know all that. This paragraph, other than the first sentence,
is primarily for the benefit of lurkers. :)
ASG
Ananda Gupta
<7d15390a.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote in message
>news:<Xns92FFA64...@199.45.49.11>...
>> EPISTEMOLOGY FOR BEGINNERS
>>
>
>An excellent essay, which succeeds in its purpose. Thanks for your
>efforts. I have some questions and some observations.
>
>> The purpose of this essay is to outline the basic issues in
>> epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Epistemological
>> questions include questions such as "Is there such thing as
>> knowledge?",
>
>If the answer to this question is no, then epistemology appears to be
>the study of a non-existent thing, according to the given definition.
Indeed. Some philosophers argue that the study of epistemology presupposes
that one must answer 'yes' to the above question, but I don't agree with
them. In any case, certainly other areas of human inquiry are undecided
about elements of what they purport to be concerned with. But I agree that
if one decides to adopt skepticism, one is probably committed to the idea
that epistemology is a waste of time, and further time spent on it ought to
be concerned with verifying one's own view or persuading others.
>Can a field of study question the existence of the subject of the
>field of study? Is it possible that an epistemologist considers this
>question for a long time, makes an irrefutable argument leading to the
>answer `no,' and then stays silent for the rest of time?
Or decides to study some other discipline, or decides to spend his time
refuting knowledge-claims.
>It seems, of course, that the answer to the question can be `no', if
>one regards epistemology purely as a language game, or as a kind of
>mathematics. But if epistemological propositions are to be tied to
>something in the world, if we believe that they may express something
>that can be shown to be the case, do we not have to believe it
>justified and true that knowledge in some form exists?
I don't think so. Certainly common sense dictates that knowledge must
exist; after all, that's how most people, even skeptics, live their lives.
(Skeptics don't often act, for example, as if they really believe that the
people around them might not exist.)
Regardless, keep in mind that the skeptic is not *denying* that knowledge
claims are true. He's just denying that they are *justified*, which is to
say that they might be true, and might not, and there's no way to know
either way.
>We may certainly question what the word `knowledge' means, but at
>least the existence of the word cannot be regarded as an
>accident. This word strives to describe something.
"Unicorn" describes something too, but that doesn't mean unicorns exist (of
course a skeptic would say they might, might not, nobody knows :) ).
>So the question, at least, appears to me to be a meta-epistemological
>question, your demonstration following Huemer that the skeptic forces
>us to consider something important about the consistency of a proposed
>set of apparently reasonable axioms of the theory of knowledge
>notwithstanding.
Fair enough. I'd be willing to accept a rephrase of the question "Is there
such thing as knowledge" to the question "If there is knowledge, what
precisely is it?".
>It is commonplace to speak loosely of orderings of fields of study,
>so: `mathematics is prior to physics, physics is prior to chemistry,
>chemistry is prior to chemical engineering.' A relationship of logical
>dependence of the later fields of study in the ordering on the earlier
>is implied. But it is less than clear that this is an accurate way of
>speaking, except in a very specific and well-delimited fashion. The
>relationships may be more complex, I suppose.
John Wilkins summed up this point very well, I thought. Science makes
knowledge claims. Therefore an understanding, or at least a taking-for-
granted, of what knowledge claims *are* is necessary. Of course one might
deny that science does in fact make knowledge claims, but that seems odd.
>If one does not accept a linear, or a purely branched ordering of
>different fields of study, then is it not equally possible that
>science, to the extent that it is not simply a field of study, is in
>some ways prior to epistemology?
To show that you'd have to give examples of scientific claims that are
*inherent* to doing epistemology, or show that the conclusions of
epistemology are scientific and require understanding or taking-for-granted
of certain scientific propositions. I'm not aware of any such claims or
conclusions.
>Also, is it not possible that science is worthwhile whether or not it
>contributes to human knowledge as you have defined it below?
Well, it depends on what you think the standard of justification for
scientific claims ought to be. Scientific claims are ultimately justified
by observations. What are observations ultimately justified by?
>Doing science, after all, is a human way of behaving. First and
>foremost it implies a certain way of acting in the world, with respect
>to learning about certain aspects of the world. There may be other
>ways of determining the `worthwhile-ness' of a way of behaving than by
>measuring what it contributes to human knowledge. Would one deny that
>music, art, theology or doing cross-word puzzles are worthwhile
>activities because one found that they failed to contribute to human
>knowledge?
Excellent point. However, I suspect most scientists would be unsatisfied
with the idea that the only reason their discipline is a worthwhile human
pursuit is something it shares with theology or music.
>> I. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE?
>>
>> What's the definition of knowledge? The crude philosophical
>> definition is: "Justified, true belief". I say crude because this
>> definition can be, and has been, improved upon. Now we have a
>> three-word definition of knowledge.
>>
>
>This appears to be a static definition of knowledge, and you proceed
>to define belief purely with respect to propositions, so you also
>define knowledge purely with respect to propositions.
>
>It may be, and I don't deny it here, that it is useful to proceed
>using this definition. Having some such definition does appear to be
>necessary to defining the field of epistemology. But the area of
>inquiry will be limited, for better or for worse, depending on the
>choice of the definition.
>
>The definition employs two abstract nouns, and the past tense of an
>abstract verb. The two words `justified' and `true' denote
>qualifications that one may apply to sentences, or to propositions
A proposition is basically a declarative sentence (as opposed to an
imperative one, for example).
>which are in and of themselves purely linguistic constructs. The word
>`belief' commonly denotes a mental state relative to a proposition
>which, I presume, is different than the mental state commonly denoted
>by `knowledge'.
>I am not sure whether belief is actually prior to knowledge, so I
>worry that there may be some circularity in the definition.
Not sure what you mean here -- by the definition knowledge is a type of
belief, so I don't see how it could be circular. To show it's circular
you'd have to show that a belief is defined in terms of knowledge, which it
pretty clearly isn't.
>If someone says:
>
>`I believe that GW Bush has been elected President of the US. I know
>that GW Bush has been elected President of the US.'
>
>then we probably understand him. But if he had said:
>
>`I don't believe that GW Bush has been elected President of the
>US. I know that GW Bush has been elected President of the US.'
>
>then we also likely understand him, especially if can we hear the
>prosody and the tone of voice, and then the meaning is quite
>different.
I agree that we would understand in both cases, even though by the
definition given the second is a contradiction, because the second is an
instance of the practice of emphasizing a strong clause by denying a weak
one (e.g. "It's not raining -- it's pouring!").
>There is surely equivocation on the meaning of the word
>`belief' in the above example, but are we sure that that equivocation
>does not include some parcel of truth with respect to the mental
>states which belief, and knowledge denote. Are these pure and distinct
>mental states?
Knowledge is a subset of one's beliefs, so "distinct" is perhaps
misleading, but as to the other question I don't see any prima facie reason
to suppose that the difficulty you imply is there.
>It may also be this way with knowledge. It may be that there is a
>mental state of knowing with respect to some proposition which is only
>produced in the act of demonstrating that a proposition has the
>properties of being a justified, true belief: that we only know things
>in showing them or pointing to them.
Perhaps the act of showing or demonstrating helps us to understand our own
justifications for the beliefs we hold, which in turn cements them as
knowledge. But certainly not all justifications are like that (I know the
Pythagorean Theorem is sound, but I don't know how to prove it).
>In this view, there would exist among all possible propositions a
>certain subset of propositions that we can say we know, and these
>would constitute `knowledge.' Knowledge would be a set of propositions
>which we could list in some static text.
>
>The process of acquiring knowledge would be one of digging among
>propositions, constructing many of them, and considering which among
>the interesting ones satisfied the qualifications you presented for
>being known propositions. The pile of propositions that we
>collectively know, could be called human knowledge. Science, or
>creationism, you would say, is worthwhile if it contributes to
>building the pile of the known propositions higher.
>
>But if I were correct, and there is a dynamic component to knowledge,
>then one might take a quite different view. One might say that the act
>of demonstrating propositions is the worthwhile thing, for it is that
>act which produces the mental state of knowledge in the maximum number
>of people.
Not sure about that either -- surely it would be better for there to be
lots of knowledge *available* to all than for everyone to have, say, ten
beliefs they know to be true? (And the ten beliefs are the same for
everyone?)
Regardless, it seems to me that the act of demonstration is one kind of way
of acting to justify, which seems consistent with the JTB conception of
knowledge.
>There are also non-propositional mental constructs, which are, of
>course, left out of epistemology as you have defined it. Language is
>one function of the brain, but it is not all of its functions.
>
>People with undamaged brains will react in stereotypical fashion when
>from a standing position, they are pushed, lose their balance and
>begin to fall. Does this capability constitute something we can call
>knowledge?
I doubt it, since it doesn't seem to be a belief.
>If I walk to the edge of a very high cliff and look over it, there
>will be a very strong tendency for me to step back from the edge, and
>not to step over it. This is an automatic reaction to the visual image
>which takes place inside me, though to be sure I could choose to
>overcome this reaction and step into the void. Does this tendency not
>constitute a kind of knowledge?
Not unless the tendency is also a belief. But surely we expect more of
e.g. science than to instill in us certain instincts.
>These abilities, it seems to me, can also quite reasonably be called
>knowledge. It is not the technical definition that you are trying to
>present, but I wonder if the technical definition is really
>sufficient.
Maybe not, for the examples you give, but I think the skeptic will still be
perfectly happy if he can persuade us that none of our *beliefs* can count
as knowledge. Another thing he might do, in the figure skating example, is
deny that you do in fact know how to do a triple axel, since you might not
even have a physical body, and the world you live in might have physical
rules such that if you attempted a triple axel using only your knowledge of
the technique, it would not work.
>One may raise the objection that the physical abilities I listed are
>all fundamentally different in kind from the ability, say, to express
>the volume of a hypersphere in n-dimensional space in closed
>mathematical form, or that doing physics is a very different activity
>in kind than doing a triple Axel.
To the extent that doing physics involves expressing necessary truths, the
skeptic can't complain. But once one starts expressing contingent truths
("there are nine planets revolving around the Sun") the skeptic will chime
in again.
>I guess that I am questioning whether the static, truth propositional
>definition of knowledge which you express very well below, is
>sufficient, or whether it is necessary to be more general in the
>description.
Again, I do think the skeptic will be okay with just showing that none of
our *beliefs* are justified (maybe he can't object to our instinctual
reactions, or to mathematical proofs).
A different justification, to be sure. Not sure how mental states come
into it. I agree that having a belief is a mental state.
>By your propositional definition of belief, the mental state is of
>course, irrelevant, all that is relevant is the truth value assigned
>to the proposition. If the value is true, it then becomes a
>belief. But for most people the perception of the belief will be
>different in the two cases. The difference, the reason why I imagine you
>say that one procedure provides a good justification and the other does
>not is that we all have prior knowledge of how coins behave, or
>rather, in this case, we have a prior belief that the particular coin
>that was flipped behaves as many coins have been observed to do,
>namely that they come up heads or tails pretty much equally often when
>tossed, whether it is raining outside or not, so that our assignment
>of the truth values under this procedure may just as well be `I
>believe that the proposition `it is raining outside' is heads.' Or `I
>believe that the proposition `it is raining outside' is tails.'
Not sure what you mean by characterizing those two rephrases as "truth
values".
>The difficulty has actually come in earlier, I think, with the
>definition of truth you took from Aristotle. I am not sure that the
>issues of truth and of justification can be separated in the way that
>you say they can. For in the definition it was required, it was
>implicit, that we can check what is and what is not.
I don't think it did imply any such thing. You'll have to clarify why you
think it did.
And it seems fairly clear that we can have justified, false beliefs (I
believe the time is 2:00 p.m. but unbeknownst to me my watch is broken and
it is actually 1:00 p.m.) and unjustified, true beliefs (I believe there is
an alien intelligence orbiting Proxima Centauri, and suppose that there
really is one).
> There must be
>some direct access to the world of facts, or else the truth values of
>a proposition cannot be assigned.
Sure they can. I assert "It's true that it's snowing in Kuala Lumpur right
now." There, I assigned a truth value without any access to the (relevant)
facts. Of course that assertion is unjustified, and for justification one
*would* need access to those facts.
>One may well be equally well satisfied with the belief that it is
>raining outside on the basis of the coin flip, if one has prior
>knowledge, say, that it rains 50% of the time in the part of the world
>in which the room is located, and if one is not capable of opening the
>window to check, and if one does not have to go outside.
You really think both justifications (flipping the coin and looking outside
the window, even the latter is impossible), even in the circumstances you
describe, would be equally powerful?
>But if there is to be access and correspondence of known propositions
>(knowledge) to the world of facts, then the two processes of defining
>the truth values and of justifying the propositions may be of
>necessity entangled.
It just seems odd to say that a false belief can be knowledge, that's all.
>> I am not going to go into the merits of these solutions here - all
>> have their critics.
>>
>
>What do epistemologists generally say about the existence of skeptics?
>Are there really any of them, in the above sense? Or are they only
>hypothetical? ;->
There might be ;)
>> That, in a nutshell, is what I see as the relevance of epistemology to
>> what we are talking about in this newsgroup. Obviously this is not a
>> philosophy newsgroup, but I think it is important to be clear about
>> those views one holds (implicitly or not) that are prior to science,
>> because they have a way of trickling in and leaving a stain.
>
>The nub of your argument above appears to be that one must be careful
>to establish exactly what is required for a belief to be justified. I
>would certainly not deny that, though I am not certain fully how to do
>it. I have an idea of how it is done in practice, but rather doubt I
>am capable of laying it all out.
That is indeed the crux of it -- be careful what you say must obtain for a
belief to be justified, or you might end up with the conclusion that *no*
beliefs are justified.
ASG
Neil W Rickert
>Fair enough. I'd be willing to accept a rephrase of the question "Is there
>such thing as knowledge" to the question "If there is knowledge, what
>precisely is it?".
If epistemologists started to take that question seriously, they
might be taken a little more seriously.
Matt Silberstein
<at...@earthlinkNOSPAM.net>:
[snip]
>I think one can, with sufficient effort, define sets so that they are
>never fuzzy. If you are 48.000 inches tall, you are a dwarf; if you
>are 48.001 inches tall, you are not. At 23:59:59 of a certain day,
>you are a minor; at midnight you are an adult.
Definitions are easy, application is difficult. How do you
measure height? Do you include hair? Do you push it down? Morning
or evening?
>Society makes
>distinctions like this all the time for legal reasons. The problem
>is, such distinctions are artificial. A height difference of 0.001
>inches or an age different of one second does not make one into a
>different kind of person. If people want a way to describe reality,
>they need a language that reflects the reality.
Yes. People often forget that the distinctions are arbitrary, not
natural. We have this frequently in this group discussing kinds
vs species and whether species/families/genera are real or not.
>Natural languages aren't great at capturing that reality; they almost
>always lead us to say that "X is a Y", not "X is sort of a Y, but not
>entirely".
Essentialism is a big part of our language. That said, Korzibsky
talked about this problem. I keep on meaning to find out why he
is considered a kook. I certainly learned this piece from him.
> I suspect that a big part of the reason for this is
>because the human brain is hardwired to make us think of things in
>such terms.
I think it is also easy to do.
> (As an aside, I believe that courses in psychology should
>be required as part of any serious philosophy curriculum.) As you
>note, scientists often deal with it statistically, but there are still
>plenty of cases where it would be wise to recognize that the concepts
>are fuzzy. (The definition of species is a notorious example.)
>
>It should also be noted that fuzziness can come from other sources
>besides variation of the set members. Off the top of my head,
>fuzziness can also come from (1) uncertainty in our knowledge about
>the set members, (2) subjectivity, and/or (3) poor definition of the
>set. These kinds of fuzziness should at least be recognized and
>usually considered separately. Do philosophers do that already?
Yes.
--
Matt Silberstein
Stupendous -
The only word that starts off as an insult and ends up as a compliment...
Except, of course, for "Jerking"
Tony Martin
John Wilkins
> wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote...
No, you don't. Do they have to go along with you? Is "naturalistic
enough to suit darth_versive_" a predicate epistemologists should strive
to satisfy? Is there a reason why the naturalistic program in philosophy
cannot be run at the same time? After all, philosophers tend not to use
the same resources as cogntiive psychologists and neurophysiologists.
Even ethologists have a different section of the library shelves.
Can you be a bit more specific about what you mean, exactly, by "hybrid
traditional/naturalistic"? Are you saying now that the issues that arose
at, say, the time of Descartes and Hume WRT knowledge no longer apply?
If so, can you back that up? Tell us which issues no longer have a
purchase and why.
This is not a piss-taking question; if you have a novel argument I am
really interested. It would not be the first time that a problem shift
occurred in philosophy. But at the moment all I have is your distaste
for the topic...
>
> > I have my own view, and unsurprisingly it is an evolutionary view - our
> > synthetic a prioria (beliefs which are not true by definition, and yet
> > which we need to kick off our ability to make inductive and abductive
> > inferences) are the a posterioria of evolution. But that raises its own
> > problems, because evolution cannot ensure that an adaptation is optimal,
> > merely that it is adequate to the past (and guess what? This is just the
> > old problem of inductive justification).
>
> Yes. I'm aware of your views. And while I may disagree with them
> where the memetics hypothesis is concerned, I do agree with them where
> the larger framework of evolution, selection pressure and adaptation
> is concerned.
So, how do we deal with the problem of induction writ large in
evolutionary terms? How do we know that what we know is not an illusion
forced on us by the conditions our senses and cognitive abilities were
adapted to in the Pleistocene?
"Belief" is, as I point out in another post, an atom of the discourse
here. It surely can be further analysed (and has been elsewhere in
philosophy; Ryle did a fair bit of this, IIRC), but does it *need* to be
here? A belief is an elision for "propositional attitude" or some such -
it is a declarative sentence to which an individual assigns a truth
value of T.
"Naturalism" in philosophy means roughly - something that can be derived
from a statement of fact and nothing else. It means that we do not need
to have, for example, existing Laws of Thought in some Platonic realm.
It means we do not need to make recourse to non-natural rules. It does
not mean we have to give a detailed account of the subject, complete
with hypotheses. That *is* what science is for, not philosophy. The
Naturalistic Program is an attempt to develop an epistemology that
lacks, for example, God's guarantee of infallibity (such as Berkeley and
Descartes thought guaranteed our knowledge of the real world).
So far as I can tell, the result is best summed up by Quine:
"Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic, but
praiseworthy, tendency to die before reproducing their kind."
John Wilkins
> John Wilkins wrote:
> >
...
> > And "real" is different from "known" or "knowable". There are several
> > sense of "real"; the one I most like is effectively the pragmatist one -
> > if it makes a difference, it's real. But in Quine's terms, "to be is to
> > be the value of a bound variable"; that is, in your broadest set of best
> > theories about the world, it's real if it's required by that set of
> > theories. Others, like Putnam, take something to be real *only* if it is
> > required by the theory - this is called internal realism. The idea that
> > all entities of some *ideal* science are real is called scientific
> > realism. Pay your money and take your choice...
> > --
>
> What is "real" is a question of great interest to me. I would humbly
> suggest that there is no single "reality". Rather there are a great
> multiplicity of realities, something you've illustrated in what you
> wrote above. What each reality looks like depends on the filter
> through which you view it, or the map you use to describe it. A
> reality seen through a blue filter is a blue reality. A reality seen
> through a red filter is a red reality.
This does not follow, although I know some who agree. At best what you
are saying is that we have a different *perception* or *description* of
the phenomenal realm. Kant would say that there is a noumenal world
independently of your descriptions. Berkeley would, on the other hand,
roughly agree with you. A scientific realist would say that science is
giving us access to the ontology of the world.
>
> Futhermore, the realities you mentioned are *abstract* realities.
> These are the kinds of realities described by science and philosophy.
> They are "thought-about" realities. The everyday world which we
> normally encounter when we're not thinking *about* it is a different
> type of reality yet.
I think you are merely redefining the term "real" to mean "experience".
Take this to its conclusion and what you have is just a kind of radical
empiricism. This has its own problems; to be a consistent empiricist you
have to reject anything not experienced. This means that you cannot
experientially define what it is to *be* experienced. This view is
incoherent.
>
> I got into a brief exchange with Ken Cope in a previous thread over a
> statement I made about the physical world being a constructed
> cognitive map. I pointed out that the picture that physics has of
> reality has changed radically from what it was in the 19th century
> after we moved into quantum mechanics and special and general
> relativity. I asked, rhetorically, does anyone really believe that
> spacetime *exists* as a concrete physical manifestation or that all
> particles of matter are built up from the different modes of
> vibrations of infinitesimal vibrating strings.
>
> He answered (and I'm paraphrasing here) that regardless of whether the
> curvature of spacetime (whatever that is) produced by massive objects
> as described in general relativity actually occurs or is only a
> concept that exists in our minds, he still puts his pants on one leg
> at a time.
>
> And I agree. So do I. But we're talking about two totally different
> realities here: everyday reality and the abstract reality (realities)
> described by modern physics.
Well, I would read it thus: "putting on one's pants a leg at a time" is
a description of the same reality at a level in which the differences of
picture in the various physical stories makes no difference. For
example, in our frame of reference, it doesn't affect our dressing
algorithms if the universe is Newtonian, Einsteinian or Quantum. The
resolution of the latter alternatives is way below the resolution of the
former.
However, in one way I do agree with you: science is picture building. It
is a representation of the ways in which we should expect the world to
behave. The German word, so much more impressive than the English, is
Bildung - science is a Weltsbildung. Hence we get confused when we talk
about the "world of physics" - it can either mean the domain of
description-independent phenomena that physical theories try to cpature
(which excludes all but some generic features of pants-putting-on), or
we can mean the Bildung of the discipline. I prefer to think of the
world as that which science is a picture. To go the other way is to put
the conceptual cart before the physical horse. Horses pull ideas, not
vice versa.
The position sometimes taken by post-Kantians is that there *is* no
other world but that of our descriptions. Hilary Putnam called this view
Internal Realism - and then went on interminably about Brains in Vats to
illustrate a *logical* possibility that he argued showed there was no
way to assert metaphysical realism consistently. I agree - you cannot
*state* metaphysical realism, because as soon as it is stated, you are
taking about words and their meanings. But nevertheless I consider
myself a realist in the metaphysical sense, and there is, IMO, only
*one* reality; one which we talk about more or less accurately, and
which we see well or badly.
So realism often comes down to how *we* can tell if a picture of the
world is good or bad. My answer to that is a kind of eliminativism -
really *bad* ways of looking at the world tend not to get passed on.
This doesn't guarantee that what is left is good, though. It's a
conundrum... :-)
John Wilkins
What does "psychology" study?
db
>
> On Fri, 10 Jan 2003 21:16:12 +0000 (UTC), a...@verizon.net (Ananda
> Gupta) wrote:
>
> >First let's start with "belief". What's a belief? A belief is a
> >proposition that a person accepts as true. It is possible to have false
> >beliefs; for example, if I believe that I am Napoleon Bonaparte, that would
> >be a false belief (even though I think it's true). It would be absurd if
> >someone were to say that he believes something yet knows that belief to be
> >outside." That is not a formal contradiction, but it is a very odd thing
> >to say.
>
> called for rain all day. Do you believe it is raining?
God is nowhere to be seen. Many people claim there is a god.
Do you believe in God?
Do you see the difference in meaning of the term "believing"
in your and in my statement?
Your argument is nothing but a word game.
db
David Wilson
I too have comment which you might want to consider if this gets turned into
an FAQ.
In article <Xns92FFA64...@199.45.49.11> on January 10 in talk.origins
a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote:
... [snip] ....
> Now for "true". What is it for a proposition to be true? Aristotle put it
> most simply: "To say of what is, that it is not, and of what is not, that
> it is, is false, while to say of what is, that it is, and of what is not,
> that it is not, is true." That is, a true proposition agrees with the
> facts of reality it describes, and a false proposition does not. ...
... [snip] ...
> 1. Either (some form of) creationism is true or (some form of) evolutionary
> theory is true.
> 2. If (that form of) evolutionary theory is true, then skepticism is true.
> 3. Skepticism is false.
> 4. Therefore, (that form of) evolutionary theory is false.
> 5. Therefore, creationism is true.
Theories (in the sense used here) are not simply propositions, so they cannot
be true or false in the senses you have defined above. Personally, I try to
avoid referring to them as "true" or "false" at all, since I'm never quite
sure what that really means. If you revise your article, perhaps you could
expand your definition to give an outline of what it means for theories like
those you mention to be true or false.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Wilson
SPAMMERS_fingers@WILL_BE_funnelweb_PROSECUTED_internet.com.au
(Remove underlines and upper case letters to obtain my email address)
John Wilkins
The *definitions* of "species" the *word* are clear enough - it is the
*species* themselves that fail to be nice and neat.
The problem with vague predicates is not that they are not useful, or
that we do not make use of them, but that there is no easy way in which
we can say they *capture* anything? If things are vague, then how do
vague predicates capture them? Either they do, or they don't... this is
why I think that all the fooraw about fuzzy sets collapses down to
statements of a statistical nature. Something is only vague if it can be
said of an ensemble of things. IMO. What this means at quantum levels I
have no idea. I hold to the older hope that a deterministic sense will
eventually be given to the elements of quanta...
>
> It should also be noted that fuzziness can come from other sources
> besides variation of the set members. Off the top of my head,
> fuzziness can also come from (1) uncertainty in our knowledge about
> the set members, (2) subjectivity, and/or (3) poor definition of the
> set. These kinds of fuzziness should at least be recognized and
> usually considered separately. Do philosophers do that already?
Yes. This is generally considered under the rubric of subjectivity or
arbitrariness or error (see, for example, Deborah Mayo's recent book on
error).
>
> --
> Mark Isaak at...@earthlink.net
> Don't read everything you belive.
John Wilkins
> wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote...
> > dkomo <dkomo...@cris.com> wrote:
> >
> > > John Wilkins wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Do you *really* think that epistemology is just some parlour game that
> > > > ignores reality? Do you really think that the extremely clever folk who
> > > > discuss these things don't know every single sophomoric objection you
> > > > have made here.
> > >
> > > I, for one, would like to hear some rebuttals to these objections. I
> > > didn't think the objections were all that sophomoric.
> >
> > Let's see... gosh we can solve some problems so all knowledge is
> > scientific? That's not sophomoric?
>
> But that wasn't my objection at all. Perhaps you misunderstood what I
> wrote; that wouldn't have been hard to do (for one thing, I kept
> saying "philosophers" when I meant "postmodernists"). I don't know,
> or care, what your definition of "knowledge" is, or whether I have
> all, some, or any. I'm saying that "scientific knowledge" is that set
> of statements that, as far as we can measure, match phenomena in the
> real world. Is that somehow a sophomoric objection to philosophy? If
> so, can you elaborate?
Well if you mean postmodernists, say so. If I meant by "Christian"
"rabid fundamentalist racist bigot" then I would think some fairly harsh
things about Christianity that would be bound to upset a number of
people here. Some Christians may be, but most aren't, and anyone talking
about Christianity might be expected to know that. Likewise, some
philosophers are social constructionists (although IMO rather fewer than
sociologists), and postmodernists (again, fewer than literary critics),
but the bulk are not except, perhaps, in Europe, and only some of there.
I know a goodly many analytic philosophers from the Low Countries and
Scandanavia, as well as Germany and even Italy (granted, the last are
rare).
I have discussed my views of the idea that science matches the real
world - clearly I agree, but how to show that? It is merely circular to
say there is a real world that is measurable and so science can present
statements about it. To argue that science even can present statements
based on measurement is difficult - you need to do a whole lot of work
on what counts as measurement, what error is, what information is
contained in measurements, how scientific statements represent that
information. To go adding a "real world" as part of the objection to
*philosophy* (even postmodernism) is question-begging in extremis.
>
> > How's this: folk medicine has for thousands if not hundreds of thousands
> > of years enabled people to live in a host of difficult environments. So
> > therefore it must be more correct than science.
> >
> > Disagree? Good. Now you are doing philosophy...
>
> In my earlier message I described one possible scientific response.
> Was it "philosophy" to do so? I guess my problem is I haven't heard a
> definition of what "philosophy" is -- something you no doubt know very
> well, but I must admit to confusion on the question. I call my
> response to it science. Perhaps by "proper" definitions it's both?
By my definition, philosophy is the metadiscipline of examining other
disciplines, including science. It asks the questions about the
consistency and composition of the disciplines (any intellectual
tradition, really) that cannot be consistently or non-circularly asked
within the discipline. So when you ask, "what is good science?" for
instance, you are asking a question that you cannot answer
scientifically. At that point, it becomes a philosophical question.
>
> > > > There's this thing called logical consistency - all the proposals made
> > > > so far, including the inductivist one that you so blithely assert is
> > > > part of the real world, have problems.
> > >
> > > Such as?
> > >
> > > Have you ever considered the idea that philosphy itself is built on an
> > > inductive foundation? That is, the deductive reasoning which
> > > philosophy prides itself on has been used all these thousands of years
> > > because it works. That was the basic empirical discovery of the
> > > Greeks. Logic works. That's an inductive truth.
> > >
> > > So when philosophy is so critical of induction and empiricism, it is
> > > actually engaging in the dreaded (by philosophy) circularity of
> > > thinking.
> >
> > "Philosophy" is not critical of anything. Philosophy is not a single
> > agent capable of being critical or approving. There are philosophies -
> > some of them are opposed to induction, some aren't. Some it's hard to
> > tell.
>
> Some philosophies are opposed to induction? They don't accomplish
> much, I take it.
They have solutions to the problem of induction. One of these is Karl
Popper's philosophy of science and concomittant epistemology. For
reasons you might like to consider, a lot of *scientists* like him.
>
> I think you avoided the question, though. Is not philosophy built on
> an inductive foundation? Can it criticize induction without
> undermining itself?
No, and yes. Much philosophy actually relies upon argument to the best
explanation, AKA abductive reasoning. It does not take a sounding of
data and make generalisations. Instead it asks, what explanation of
these phenomena/anomalies/problems is the best solution on offer? An
example of that is, of course, materialism. Another might be theism. It
all boils down to the things you think make for good arguments.
Being philosophers, of course, they then start to argue about *that*
too.
>
> And on a related topic, is it somehow philosophically ignorant to say
> that the validity of induction is an observed condition of the cosmos,
> and proceed with scientific inquiry on that basis?
No, but it doesn't avoid the *problem* of induction - which is, how can
we be confident that the next inductive inference will work? Or, how
confident can we be, & c.? If we cannot have any objective or
nonarbitrary level of confidence, how do we test these inferences?
>
>
> > I am an inductivist, and what's worse, a nativist inductivist. We do
> > well at inductions because we are innately inductive cognitive machines.
> > That is a *philosophical* position, and it has to be explored, explained
> > and justified. You cannot merely *assert* it and say, "well, now, that's
> > it for philosophy, eh?" If you do, then you are showing a complete lack
> > of critical thinking. Nothing comes for free. The issue is not whether
> > induction works, but *why*, and in what circumstances.
>
> And when my answer is "the reason induction works is that the universe
> has a level of fundamental simplicity", why is that a sophomoric
> objection to philosophy? AFAICT it is an answer to the question that
> is good enough for science, whether it answers the questions
> philosophers ask or not.
If I said to a physical student that all we needed to know about gravity
was that it varied inversely to the square of the distance of the
masses, would that be sufficient to stop physicists arguing over or
investigating the nature of gravity?
What is meant by "simplicity"? What is, in Hume's terms, "unifromity",
and when we meet a case that seems to be *non*uniform, what are we to
think? Are all our investigations now at risk? Once you get past the
simple answer, you find complications and problems...
For example, there are an infinite number of curves one can draw through
a set of data points on a plot. Which one should you use? Why? Has
anyone done a *scientific* study as to the success of one kind of curve
over another? What choice of independent variables is best?
All these issues fall under the problem of induction, and they are all
just variations on, "how do we justify a generalised knowledge claim
based on a finite number of samples?"
>
> This thread was based on the use of philosophy to object to scientific
> discovery. I don't think it has a leg to stand on when it does.
Except it never did, if you go back and reread Anada's post and my
responses and his.
>
>
> > That dismissive mindset would have meant that Boole, Frege, Tarski, and
> > a host of other logicians should have stuck happily with Aristotelian
> > syllogisms - after all, it worked just fine for everyone until the
> > nineteenth century, so why change it? Forget Hilbert, forget Gödel,
> > forget Turing.
>
> I don't think I was objecting to the work of any of them, but perhaps
> you can show me where I was. I was saying that the definitions of
> knowledge, fact, truth, induction, etc. that science uses are
> appropriate to the task of doing science (and it happens that the
> definitions are neither hard nor deep).
>
> > No, I was being deliberately, knowingly and forcefully ad hominem. Tit
> > for tat, you see. Someone says I can fuck off, then I say they can. I
> > get pissed off occasionaly at the anti-philosophy mindset, as if it was
> > in any way different to the know-nothingness of creationism.
> >
> > Some philosophy sucks. I am the first to admit that.
>
> (Side question: how does one tell that a given philosophy sucks?
> Under what conditions is a formerly favored philosophy abandoned?)
Logical inconsistency, incoherence, if it makes a factual claim and that
is shown to be false, and worst of all, stalling in the face of a
progressing series of problems (although that can be due to a failure to
attract top minds, and can be reversed at any time).
>
> > But it takes
> > *years* to work through the complexities of any intellectual tradition,
> > and those who think a few simplistic considerations somehow undercut the
> > raison d'etre for an entire discipline are just being moronic. If you
> > have criticisms of *anything* - theology, science, art, architecture,
> > philosophy - you have to read the material first. It's basic
> > intellectual honesty.
>
> I should not have criticized "philosophers"; I should have limited my
> objections to the know-nothing postmodernists whose arguments were
> being described originally.
Yes, but they weren't. Anada was describing *skeptics* not
postmodernists. Pomos are usually about as skeptical as Ed Conrad when
one of their own makes a Grand Pronouncement. Skeptics, who, BTW, go
back to ancient Greek times, choose to doubt assertions until they are
proven or given such warrant that no reasonable person *could* doubt
them. A continuing tradition, including scientific thinkers, holds that
skepticism is a way to attain *solid* information about the world.
>
> > Of course we could just treat intellectual matters as tribal fights. I'm
> > sure that the creationists would love that. Then we get to the point
> > where conceptual problems are solved by whoever can get the biggest
> > vote, or the largest army. I'll stick with a sense of rationality, if
> > you don't mind.
>
> Again, that's very very different from what I said. Dkomo said
> something similar, and I objected to it. Reality is not based on
> consensus. It is not necessarily the case that we successfully
> understand reality -- the only way we can tell whether we do (or, more
> accurately, whether we understand something /similar/ to reality) is
> to test it and observe the result. Do you know of another way? I
> would be *very* interested in hearing.
No, that's pretty much the way I think of it, although it gets a *lot*
more complex in the doing than in the telling.
>
> eyelessgame
David Wilson
a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) wrote:
> d...@bnl.gov (David Ewan Kahana) wrote in
> <7d15390a.03011...@posting.google.com>:
>
> > ... [snip] ....
> >What do epistemologists generally say about the existence of skeptics?
> >Are there really any of them, in the above sense? Or are they only
> >hypothetical? ;->
>
> There might be ;)
The quintessential embodiment of this form of extreme skepticism was supposed
to have been Pyrrho of Elea (c.360-270 BC). For a brief biography, see the
web page <http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/p/pyrrho.htm>.
In the introduction to his "Sceptical Essays", Bertrand Russell relates the
following anecdote about Pyrrho, which is not given on the web page cited
above.
Supposedly, once, when he was young, Pyrrho came across his teacher, stuck
in a ditch and unable to get out. After pondering what to do for some time,
he decided there was no sufficient ground for believing he would do any good
by helping his teacher out of the ditch, and continued on his way. After
other people had helped the teacher out of the ditch, he supposedly defended
Pyrrho against their reproaches, and praised him for remaining true to the
teacher's principles.
As is customary when relating such anecdotes, I note that they may well have
been circulated by unscrupulous opponents of the Skeptics.
The site containing the web page given above also contains articles on a wide
range of other philosophers and philosophical issues. There are links to
three on Skepticism on the page <http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/s> .
Robin Levett
news:b022p6$7ko$1...@husk.cso.niu.edu...
....and Anand's post doesn't address that question in that...?
--
________________________________________________________________
Robin Levett
rle...@ibmrlevett.uklinux.net
(address munged by addition of Big Blue)
Atheist = knows of and uses Occam's Razor
Agnostic = knows of but isn't sure whether to use Occam's Razor
Fundy = what's Ockam's erasure?
___________________________________________________
Karsten Knönagel
John Wilkins <wil...@wehi.edu.au> wrote:
<snip>
> However, in one way I do agree with you: science is picture building.
> It is a representation of the ways in which we should expect the world
> to behave. The German word, so much more impressive than the English,
> is Bildung - science is a Weltsbildung.
<nitpick>
The awful German language. To translate "science" with "Bildung" would
be wrong. The German word for science is "Wissenschaft" - translated as:
the whole of all knowledge.
"Bildung" has the following meanings:
1)
"Bildung" is the sum of a person's mental and social skills and of the
knowledge of that person. (this knowledge encompasses art, philosophy,
science ... ) In this respect "Bildung" is (the result of) education.
2)
The process of education ("bilden" = "to form, to build something").
3)
As indicated above, "Bildung" can simply mean "formation". This is the
translation needed in your sentence above. It has no special scientific
meaning.
Result:
Germans have no impressive word for science. You can not deduce from
our word for science - "Wissenschaft" - the meaning "Weltsbildung".
That doesn't invalidate your point that science can be seen as a "Welts-
bildung" - the formation of concepts (pictures) about the world.
</nitpick>
k2
--
A good scapegoat is nearly as welcome as a solution to the problem.
David Ewan Kahana
These are very clever questions that make a very
good point.
Please drop this whole paragraph: it was un-needed.
You have, of course, already dropped the rest of my
post, but without comment. I take it then that you
feel no further comment was required.
To answer your questions:
Before chemists understood the importance of precise
quantitative measurements to their emerging subject, which
realisation took some little time before it spread from
physics to chemistry following the spectacular successes of
Galileo and Newton, questions about combustion, about burning,
were burning questions.
The phlogiston theory was a failed attempt to deal with
those questions.
Chemists were faced with various facts that appear hard
to explain. Wood when it burns turns to ashes, which cannot
be easily turned back into wood. Metals, when they are
heated turn into powders, which can however be turned
back into metals by heating them in the presence of
charcoal. Metal ores, when they are heated over fire produce
metals.
So it was proposed that wood consisted mostly of a fluid
called phlogiston, combined with a little earth. Burning
wood released the phlogiston into the air, along with
another fluid called caloric, leaving a small residue of
ash. Metals were regarded as a combination of calx (the soft
powder produced on heating a metal) and phlogiston. Metals
were supposedly produced from smelting metal ores, because
phlogiston released in the fire combined with the ores to
make metals.
Air supposedly had a limited ability to absorb phlogiston,
which explained why fires eventually went out if they burned
in a closed jar.
It was in some ways a very neat superficial explanation of a
set of confusing phenomena, and some of the people who
defended it were by no means idiots, but the theory fell
completely to pieces when people started carefully measuring
the weights of *all* substances involved in these transformations.
The collapse came about because it became necessary to assign
contradictory properties to phlogiston. Sometimes it had to
have positive weight, sometimes negative weight.
Now according to my understanding, a unicorn is a purported
one-horned horse. I've seen one in the `Director's cut' of
the movie `Blade Runner.'
A unicorn seems to be a mythical beast, and I'm not quite
sure what it is supposed to explain, if anything, mythology
not really being my best subject.
What does an E8 x E8 heterotic superstring describe?
I've often felt that too many of my co-students in graduate
school went very deep into the business of studying these,
whatever it is that they might describe.
But I will not say they were wrong to do that. I'm sure that
many people felt precisely the same way about Yang-Mills
theories of the weak interactions before Fadeev, Popov, `t
Hooft and Veltmann came along and showed everyone that one
could make sense out of the perturbation series.
Cheers!
David
David Ewan Kahana
> Neil W Rickert <ricke...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>
> > d...@bnl.gov (David Ewan Kahana) writes:
> >
> > >We may certainly question what the word `knowledge' means, but at
> > >least the existence of the word cannot be regarded as an
> > >accident. This word strives to describe something.
> >
> > What does "phlogiston" describe?
> >
> > What does "unicorn" describe?
>
> What does "psychology" study?
Indeed. But isn't Psyche a she rather than a what?
David Ewan Kahana
[snipped]
I'll be back to reply, probably not till tomorrow.
Ananda Gupta
<200301150252...@funnelwebinternet.com.au>:
>Allow me to add my compliments to those of John Wilkins and David
>Theories (in the sense used here) are not simply propositions, so they
>cannot be true or false in the senses you have defined above.
>Personally, I try to avoid referring to them as "true" or "false" at
>all, since I'm never quite sure what that really means. If you revise
>your article, perhaps you could expand your definition to give an
>outline of what it means for theories like those you mention to be true
>or false.
Fair enough. I'll have to think about a definition of "theory" that's
clear and preserves the meaning (I know what *I* meant, but phrasing it
precisely will take some thought).
ASG
Brian M. Scott
news:7d15390a.03011...@posting.google.com in
talk.origins:
[...]
> Now according to my understanding, a unicorn is a purported
> one-horned horse.
That's a modern heresy. A proper medieval unicorn has the
hooves and beard of a goat and a lion's tail.
[...]
Brian
John Wilkins
> In 1fotgf7.12z8s9111atpvkN%wil...@wehi.edu.au,
> John Wilkins <wil...@wehi.edu.au> wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> > However, in one way I do agree with you: science is picture building.
> > It is a representation of the ways in which we should expect the world
> > to behave. The German word, so much more impressive than the English,
> > is Bildung - science is a Weltsbildung.
>
> <nitpick>
>
> The awful German language. To translate "science" with "Bildung" would
> be wrong. The German word for science is "Wissenschaft" - translated as:
> the whole of all knowledge.
Yes, I know that. I meant that Die Wissenschaft ist eine Bildung; a
representation of the way things are. Wittgenstein used the term in the
Philosophische Untersuchungen, I believe
>
> "Bildung" has the following meanings:
>
> 1)
> "Bildung" is the sum of a person's mental and social skills and of the
> knowledge of that person. (this knowledge encompasses art, philosophy,
> science ... ) In this respect "Bildung" is (the result of) education.
>
> 2)
> The process of education ("bilden" = "to form, to build something").
>
> 3)
> As indicated above, "Bildung" can simply mean "formation". This is the
> translation needed in your sentence above. It has no special scientific
> meaning.
>
> Result:
>
> Germans have no impressive word for science. You can not deduce from
> our word for science - "Wissenschaft" - the meaning "Weltsbildung".
>
> That doesn't invalidate your point that science can be seen as a "Welts-
> bildung" - the formation of concepts (pictures) about the world.
>
> </nitpick>
>
> k2
Thanks. I was taking a somewhat abtruse usage in philosophy here. My
mistake. But bear in mind that philosophical German and Real German as
she is spoke diverged sometime before the second world war...
John Wilkins
Which a number of clever folk have managed to approximate by moving the
horn buds of immature goats so that the horns grown together as one :-)
Unicorns *do* exist. Moreover, the unicorn myth probably arose from
garbled reports of rhinoceroses, so the term "unicorn" denotes, even if
it fails to connote...
>
> [...]
>
> Brian
John Wilkins
> wil...@wehi.edu.au (John Wilkins) wrote...
> > Neil W Rickert <ricke...@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > d...@bnl.gov (David Ewan Kahana) writes:
> > >
> > > >We may certainly question what the word `knowledge' means, but at
> > > >least the existence of the word cannot be regarded as an
> > > >accident. This word strives to describe something.
> > >
> > > What does "phlogiston" describe?
> > >
> > > What does "unicorn" describe?
> >
> > What does "psychology" study?
>
> Indeed. But isn't Psyche a she rather than a what?
Well originally, yes. By the time the Stagirite wrote on the topic, the
subject had become several kinds of animating causes, resulting via the
neo-Platonists in the scala naturae.
One of the truly lovely things about t.o is that no matter how obscure
the reference, at least one person will get it.
Neil W Rickert
>"Neil W Rickert" <ricke...@cs.niu.edu> wrote in message
>news:b022p6$7ko$1...@husk.cso.niu.edu...
>> a...@verizon.net (Ananda Gupta) writes:
>> >Fair enough. I'd be willing to accept a rephrase of the
>question "Is there
>> >such thing as knowledge" to the question "If there is
>knowledge, what
>> >precisely is it?".
>> If epistemologists started to take that question seriously, they
>> might be taken a little more seriously.
>....and Anand's post doesn't address that question in that...?
It declares a priori that knowledge is justified true belief.
Neil W Rickert
>Neil W Rickert <ricke...@cs.niu.edu> wrote in message news:<b01pm4$132$3...@husk.cso.niu.edu>...
>> d...@bnl.gov (David Ewan Kahana) writes:
>>>We may certainly question what the word `knowledge' means, but at least
>>>the existence of the word cannot be regarded as an accident. This word
>>>strives to describe something.
>> What does "phlogiston" describe?
>> What does "unicorn" describe?
>Yes, of course!
>These are very clever questions that make a very
>good point.
>Please drop this whole paragraph: it was un-needed.
>You have, of course, already dropped the rest of my
>post, but without comment. I take it then that you
>feel no further comment was required.
I chose not to comment. Other points were being discussed.
Personally, I don't have any problem with the view that knowledge
exists. But I reject the claim that knowledge is justified true
belief.
John Wilkins
The senses of "theory" used by the critics of Darwinism tend to be along
the lines of "propositions about the way the world is", and so they can
be understood to be true or false (to denote or not; if we are dealing
with sophisticates, to have truth conditions that are or are not
satisfied).
The *proper* sense of "theory" in science must include some sense of
being a model that can be tested and shown to be false (and, I would
think, shown to be likely to be true, but I am a member of the Church of
Latter Day Verificationism, which is a heretical cult on the fringes).
That the model needs to be tested for truth or truthlikeness does not
mean that theories are not true or false; it does mean that the truth
conditions sufficient for acceptance or rejection are implicit in the
methodology (empirical data is often involved :-).
I think it is a legacy of the positivists of the 19th and early 20thC
that we are not supposed to say the theories are true or false. But I do
think that there is always a broader theoretical context in which one
can say of a particular theory that it is true or false. For example, if
I say that "evolutionary theory E is true" I must make use of some
criteria in a wider "theory" - call it S for empirical science - to do
so. S itself is only "true" in the context of some broader
epistemological program P of aims and methods. Those who in this thread
have justified S itself in terms of the practical value it has in our
society and life are making use of this greater-than-S program P to
validate S. But what validates P?
Hiero5ant
"John Wilkins" <wil...@wehi.edu.au> wrote in message
news:1fov9c2.ifu6lx1c83q3zN%wil...@wehi.edu.au...
The valet?
Robin Levett
Well, I wouldn't say it/he does so a priori - he does expend some
effort in justifying, or at least explaining, that definition.
What would your quarrel with the definition be?