Any old guess could be a starting point. — apokrisis

We could apply a Bayesian calculus to any old guess, and move towards a better guess, sure. That's one possible solution to Hume's scepticism.

Very much along the lines of Davidson.

At issue is finding a solution to Hume's scepticism. That is, how we can move from a finite set of observations to the "objectively best" general conclusion. We know that this is not something that can be done by a valid deduction.

In order to answer Hume's scepticism, abduction would have to show us how to infer the objectively best general conclusion.

We agree that abduction does not do this, but provides only the subjectively best general conclusion.

Hence abduction does not provide and answer to Hume's scepticism, but rather agrees with it.

I tend to agree, but isn't this ultimately a matter of worldview? The challenge, it seems, is how to persuade someone with a strongly libertarian or individualist orientation that communitarian values might offer a more viable or meaningful framework for social life. But if foundational assumptions differ how might we expect genuine persuasion to occur? Whatever the direction. — Tom Storm

Yes, that is indeed an issue, and the topic of both ethics and political philosophy. Ethics concerns what I should do, politics concerns what we should do. Of course, there is considerable interplay between to two, and ethics is already political, while politics... well, it might seek to be ethical.

Should I throw myself off the cliff after a heartbreak or do I allow someone to stop me? That is the question. — Copernicus

Is that a political question?

20 bottles? Let’s say it’s 20 drinks. — Tom Storm

American beer?

Copernicus seems intent on not paying attention to the communal implications of his predicament. Someone has to clean up the suicide. And the vomit.

Here's your error. The "best" in an IBE is not necesarily warranted (rationally justified). It just means it was chosen as "best" because it was subjectively judged to be better than alternatives that were considered. — Relativist

So an inference to the best explanation is actually an inference to any explanation?

The philosophical question at the core of modern political thought is deceptively simple yet infinitely complex: Where should we draw the line between “what I want” and “what is good for me?” — Copernicus

If you start with the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. While ethics concerns what I should do, the philosophical question at the core of political thought, modern or otherwise, is What should we do? It's about communal action. That it is about us is the bit that libertarians miss.

So what would Wittgenstein's response to Hume's scepticism be? — JuanZu

For Wittgenstein, the demand for justification presupposes a language game, a shared background of practices that already give meaning to “evidence,” “reason,” and “doubt.” To ask, “but how do we really know that causes exist?” is to try to stand outside all language games — to doubt from nowhere. And that, he’d say, is nonsensical. “If you tried to doubt everything, you would not get as far as doubting anything.” So instead of answering Hume’s scepticism, Wittgenstein dissolves it: the idea that we might need a justification for induction or causation presupposes a context of justification that itself depends on certain unquestioned practices.

In a sense it's the same answer as Hume - it's just what we do.

For Davidson, we make sense of the talk of others by presuming that they are rational and are participating in much the same word as we are. We then have the shared basis of the world in order to make sense of the talk of others. Again, we talk in terns of causes in order to make sense to each other.

That's much the same as the basic semiotic answer, that causation and belief are not primarily “out there” in the world; they are enacted and intelligible only within structured systems of interaction, whether psychological, linguistic, or semiotic. Apo and I do not differ as much as might be supposed. What Davidson, Wittgenstein, and semiotics all emphasise is that causation and belief are embedded in structured practices — psychological habits, language games, or broader semiotic systems. They are not features of the world independently of these practices. In that sense, the difference between Apo’s semiotic framing and the Wittgensteinian–Davidsonian account is largely one of emphasis: one highlights codes, the other interpretive and linguistic practices. But both converge on the insight that causal talk is intelligible only within a shared, structured system of interaction.

We could move on to the neuroscience, and talk about how neural nets recognise patterns - a sort of physiological background against which this stuff plays out.

That's very interesting. But you've forgotten to relate it to Hume's scepticism. — JuanZu

Each of those - Kant, Wittgenstein, Feyerabend and Davidson - can be understood as a reply to Hume.

No. Being warranted means to be rationally justified. — Relativist

We seem to be circling. Being warranted means to be rationally justified, and something is rationally justified if it is warranted. The best explanations are the ones which are rationally justified, and those are the ones that are warranted, and they are the ones we accept. A subjective best inference may not be warranted, but then it would not be the best inference, and so not justified, and not the best.


Help me out of the loop.

That's a very compacted account, yet pretty much spot on. Yep, for us to experience objects and events as structured and intelligible, the transcendental subject applies categories like causality, using the schematism as a bridge, and unifying perceptions under the “I think.”

Is your aim here to understand Hume, and then to move on to Kant's response? that is, are you after an exegesis, or are you looking for broad answers? It seems to me that you have a pretty good grasp of both Hume and Kant.

What I've been doing is more about relating these ideas to more recent work. So we have Hume showing that what "I" have access to is just impressions. He points out that it seems illegitimate to infer the patterns of causation and so on that make up our world. His answer is somewhat unconvincing - habit and custom. This all woke Kant, who used a transcendental argument to claim that minds are predisposed to join these impressions into those patterns.

In Wittgenstein, those “necessary conditions” become grammatical rules rather than transcendental structures: not timeless features of mind, but conventions of our shared linguistic practice. In Davidson, the unity of apperception becomes the principle of interpretive coherence: understanding others and the world depends on fitting utterances and actions into a rational, causal, and linguistic web. And in Feyerabend, even that web becomes plural — our patterns of causation and justification are practices that can vary across scientific paradigms.

How's that?

But if the ensuing belief is warranted, that's all that matters. — Relativist

Isn't "warranted" just another way of saying "best"? If it's best, then it's warranted, and if it is the one warranted move, then it's the best?

Further, both involve an evaluation that is not a deduction.

Ok, thanks - that's clearer. So values always supervene on properties, and hence intrinsic values are those that supervene on intrinsic properties. Seems I misunderstood your "it is morally valuable because of the kind of thing it is" to be saying that values are properties, and not something that supervenes on a property.

I gather that your argument now depends on physical properties not being the sort of thins that supervenes on an item, and since values do supervene, then values are not physical. Hence,

...if we are physical things then our intrinsic moral value would have to supervene on some of our essential features.....but it doesn't. — Clarendon

So your argument runs somethign like :

• All moral value supervenes on properties — that is, nothing is morally valuable “for no reason.”
• Intrinsic moral value supervenes specifically on essential properties of a thing.
• For physical things, essential properties are things like shape, size, location.
• Our intrinsic moral value does not supervene on those physical properties.
• Therefore, we are not purely physical things — our intrinsic value must supervene on something non-physical (e.g., consciousness).

But a person, or a balloon, remains what it is despite change in shape, size or location. So these do not seem to be good candidates for essential properties. It seems to me that, for example, personality might be a good candidate for an essential property of a person, and that's not physical anyway. Seems your conclusion is already present in values not being physical. You've given a different articulation of Hume's fork.

But I might leave you to it. The notion of essential properties is far more problematic than just this.

Do you agree that inference to the best explanation can warrant a belief? This of course is only if it was done rationally. — Relativist

Well, I won't disagree, but point out that "the best" remains ill-defined. If we are in agreement as to which explanation is the best, then we should accept it; but here, "the best" might just be "the one we accept"...

Which is to say that we accept the answer based on experience and custom.

So it's not so much answering Hume as agreeing with him.

Are there NO easy cases, in your opinion? — Relativist

:blush: Pretty much. Welcome to philosophical analysis.

I hope we are in a position to see the problem with the argument as it stands.

Some item X has properties a,b,c... Moral values supervene on these properties, and so on X - value(a), value(b), value (c) and so on. The value of X is some summation of the value of its properties.

But an intrinsic value, instead of taking another property as its object, is understood as instead one of the items a,b,c...

Is that close to what you have in mind? If so, there are two approaches to value at work here.

Also, and parallel to this, there seems to be a presumption that a,b,c... are physical, while valuations are not. I agree, roughly, with this, and with the intuition that sits behind it, that moral values are not physical things. But I think here, it is presumed, rather than demonstrated.

Thoughts?

I have said an IBE is not necessarily rational. But it can be. — Relativist

Good. Then we are agreed that abduction, considered as inference to the "best" explanation, does not determine one explanation, and is not itself a rational process. Do we also agree that as a result it doesn't serve to answer Humes Scepticism?

And yes, I am discussing the use of the term, and so its meaning. What I would bring out is that it is not so easy as some might suppose to set out what is a conspiracy theory and what isn't. That the detail is important.

Or one might accept some doctrine as the ultimate truth, and then save oneself the trouble of thinking by simply lambasting any objections. That works, too.

Perhaps it is necessary to bear in mind that it is possible for two incompatible interpretations of data to be right, or at least not wrong. — Ludwig V

Just so.

But we could define a "conspiracy theory" using epistemology. — Relativist

What I've read, including the paper I've already cited, leads me to think that the term functions in the way offten described by Bernard Wooley in Yes, Minister

It’s one of those irregular verbs, Minister:
I have an independent mind,
you are eccentric,
he is round the twist.

Or in our case,

I question the official story,
you believe in conspiracies,
he’s a paranoid lunatic.

The epistemic issue here is that it's again not just the evidence that is being used, but the background against which that evidence is being evaluated. Things are not so clear cut as they might seem.

Most of our beliefs are established as subjective inferences to best explanation. Consider the alternatives: few beliefs are established by deduction, and few are basic. What else is there? — Relativist

This is a good approximation, perhaps.

We do make inferences, sure. The question I would bring back to you is that of what makes one inference "the best" among those available. It need not be the case that one inference is the best explanation we have - indeed, it is more common that there are multiple inferences that satisfy the evidence at hand.

And yet we are often obliged to choose. The evidence is insufficient for the choice to be determined, so there are other things at play, including our other beliefs, and the practices we share with those around us. Our epistemic choices are guided by more than evidence; they include the whole form of the life in which we are engaged.

And here Feyerabend's thoughts come in to play. What he shows is that sometimes we infer, not to the best explanation, but to some other explanation - and that this can be a very good thing. You will come across many examples in his book, so I will not list them here.

Now the problem with calling inference to the best explanation, abduction, and listing it alongside deduction and induction, is the air of logical determinism that is given to what is in reality a practice fraught with ambiguity and guesswork. There's a lot going on here that is plainly irrational.

And this brings us back to Hume. His talk of “custom and habit” reminds us that much of our reasoning isn’t strictly rational at all — it’s rooted in the patterns we’ve come to expect, both individually and collectively. What Hume saw as psychological, Wittgenstein turned into grammar, and Feyerabend showed as scientific practice: we act, speak, and infer within a shared way of life. Causation, explanation, belief — all of these belong as much to what we do as to what we think.

No, I wouldn't say that the attitude is intrinsic to the thing. Rather, something essential to the thing is what is responsible for my valuing attitude. — Clarendon

Yes, I see that. So you are right here:

Were I to say that I find something intrinsically valuable, then, I would be saying that I value it due to some of its essential properties, rather than saying that my valuing of it is an essential property of that thing. — Clarendon

Here you show again that the value supervenes on the property. It appears to me that what you have shown is that the idea of something's having an intrinsic value doesn't work in this scheme.

To be forthright, if the value is a property of the thing, then it can be intrinsic to the thing. But if instead it is a seperate property that does not belong to the thing but supervenes on the properties of that thing, then it is not a property of the thing.

In your argument I think you move from one to the other. So rather than showing that we are not physical things, perhaps you've shown that values are not intrinsic properties of things.

To my eye, what all this shows is the poverty of the notion of a property. Better by far to talk of predicates.

Everything truly has to be about him in egocentric fashion. — apokrisis

And will continue to be so, as long as you two talk about me rather then the topic at hand.

You don't have to make this a conversation about me. But you choose to. You can stop any time you like.

I didn't start the conversation about me. But I am happy to encourage it.

An example, maybe: suppose, for the sake of the discussion, that moral value is an attitude adopted towards some thing. Then we might say that having a moral value supervenes on a given act, and on the attributes of that act.

The moral value of a thing is, for the purpose of the argument, an attitude towards that thing that supervenes on it.

Can we say that the attitude is intrinsic to the thing in question? That seems to be what would be implied by "it is morally valuable because of the kind of thing it is"...

You've been failing to answer arguments and even posts for months now. — Leontiskos

From you, yes.

Your engaging in yet an another conversation about me instead of about my arguments is gratifying. It implies you have no were left to go.

A dignified exit from a poor thread. You did some nice work here.

Excellent first post, by the way. Welcome.

Nice.

Can you clarify what it is to be morally valuable? Does having a moral value "supervene on some of our essential properties", or is it itself a property? IF "it is morally valuable because of the kind of thing it is" then isn't moral value a property of the thing - the kind of thing that it is - rather than something that supervenes on a property?

On the one hand, a thing has some set of properties and the moral value of that thing supervenes on at least some of those properties, while on the other, the moral value just is a property of the thing.

So isn't supposing that a thing can have an intrinsic moral value denying that values supervene on properties?

Hastie has resigned from the front bench - he can do more damage to Ley, the leader of the opposition, - if he is not bound by the conventions of being a shadow minister.

Andrew Hastie’s resignation over immigration couldn’t be worse timing for Sussan Ley

The Liberal Party has to sort out whether it is conservative or liberal. This is the process in play here at present.

Just noticed an article in the recent Philosophy Now that is germane: Popper, Science & Democracy.

Things are stirring...

Georgian Dream claims victory in all municipal elections in first round

Georgia’s police use water cannons on protesters trying to storm presidential palace

What's your point? Are you just acknowledging what I said about background beliefs being involved in our epistemic judgements? — Relativist

The point is clear, I hope - evidence is always equivocal. There is always a point about which folk may disagree.

I contend that more credence should be given to claims that are supported by evidence, than those that are purely speculation. — Relativist

No one would disagree ( :wink: ). At issue is how "supported by evidence" is payed out. From Quine-Duhem, we see that there are always ways to question the evidence. So the issue becomes when questioning the evidence is reasonable, and when it isn't. And it seems there is often no clear clean place at which to draw the line.

Hence,

Plausibility is a factor in epistemic judgement. — Relativist

And not the result of the application of an algorithmic method. I think you see this, but perhaps what's been said here will better articulate it.

Feyerabend's conclusion is that "Anything Goes" in choosing between hypotheses. That's too far. The trouble with "anything goes" is that we are obliged to choose, and so if anything goes, we may as well choose the easiest path, which will be what we already hold true - again, a recipe for confirmation bias. The trouble with "anything goes" is that it will amount to "everything stays the same".

But instead we can admit that the process is fraught with difficulty, and not so clean and clear as some theorists would suppose. Scientific method is not algorithmic, but communal. It is human, involving the interaction of many, many people in an organised and cooperative fashion. I'd argue that this process involves not interfering with the work of others, responding to their claims in a way that is relevant, and doing so publicly; basic liberal virtues. Values not on show in places in this very thread.

Part of that is the issue of demarcation, the separation between science and non-science, which relates to your discussion of conspiracy theories. The idea is that conspiracy theories are not scientific; they do not conform to scientific methods. Now this is I think pretty much toe right sentiment, but given that we are unable to set out what that scientific method is quite as clearly as some suppose, and hence that the difficulty in setting out what counts as a conspiracy theory and what doesn't, a bit of humility might be needed. It won't help to just tell a conspiracy believer that their theory does not match the evidence, because for them it does.

Take a look at this.

First issue is whether abduction is just brainstorming, or if it includes some selection amongst the hypotheses generated. To you, it seems it does. To others, it seems it doesn't.

The problems I want to point out apply to abduction considered as being normative - as involving choosing between hypotheses. So, to your account.

How is it that "abduction would tend to rule out theories that are commonly called conspiracy theories"? What's the basis for the selection?

The criticism I began with is that if you set out those criteria, if you set out your expectations for a good hypothesis, then what you are in effect doing is choosing only the hypotheses that meet those expectations; I somewhat hyperbolically called that "confirmation bias" - you get what you want, an so perhaps not what you need.

On this approach, is any theory that does not meet one's expectations a conspiracy theory? Seems to be so, unless there is some additional criteria.

Next step was introducing Feyerabend, who shows historical cases in which going against expectations and logical conclusions leads to progress in science - were irrationality leads to choosing the better theory. His argument gets a bit deeper than that, but there's a start, since this is counter to the naive view of abductuion as choosing the best theory.

Now some care is needed here. We agree that we do "make judgements based on data too sparse to draw a deductive conclusion". what I am baulking at is calling these judgements "abduction", if what is meant is that they are correct, or true, or worse, necessary.

All up, it seems to me that there remains a hole in your account, that explains the why of how we must choose this hypothesis over that one.

I have a problem with this part: — javra

Me, too. It's intended to show how the "why" doesn't end satisfactorily in at least some cases.

There's a whole side road concerning intentionality here, that is well worth considering. At issue is the difference, if any, between these and other causal explanations. All good stuff.

Do we go there, in this thread?

I can live with this. Can you? — javra

Yep.

See the musings added to the previous post. You've got me rethinking my reply to Un.

Is there a problem?

Given your rudeness and ridicule, why should I respond to your posts? Your worldview strikes me as sophistic bullshit.

As in the rock intended to start the avalanche that happened by intending to pursue gravitational paths of less resistance down the mountain just so? — javra

That'd be more a "how" than a "why" - how the avalanche started rather than why.

Why questions all presuppose purpose — javra

Yep.

What's proposed is causation not as an external “thing to be explained” but as a feature of our ongoing engagement with the world. Saying that causes are unreal would be a misrepresentation. Pushing the trolly causes it to move, hence it's true that pushing the trolly caused its movement. That's not an antirealist ploy.

Added:

The reason why leaves flutter is not because the wind so wills it. Lest we loose track of what are poetic truths and what is objectively real. — javra

Reconsidering, "Why did the leaves flutter - because the wind blew them" presumes neither intent nor purpose. Fair point.

Davidson treats intentions as causal, after all. I'll give @unenlightened's post some more thought.

Why did the wind blow? - because of areas of differing atmospheric pressures.
Why were there differing areas of atmospheric pressures? - because of solar heating on a rotation earth.
Why was there solar heating on a rotation earth...

Each of these presents a broader description.

Do we end with "because godswill" or perhaps "Becasue triadic thingumies"?

My point is that: 1) we can draw some conclusions based on the information that IS available; 2) some conclusions are more reasonable than others; 3) (obviously) it's contingent upon the information being correct. — Relativist

Is the argument that abduction can be used to pick out which theories are conspiracy theories? Then what counts as a conspiracy theory is which "conclusions are more reasonable than others"; but a conspiracy theorist may just insist that the conspiracy is the more reasonable conclusion.

Hence Melina Tsapos' conspiracy definition dilemma.

Yes, and there's plenty more here to unpack. "Why" questions presume intent, in some aspect, and so all that goes with intentionality.

Again, it would be very odd, wouldn't it, if a sceptic about causality proposed causal relationships to explain what causes are. I think the best way of understanding this is by comparison with Wittgenstein's exasperated "This is what I do." — Ludwig V

That nicely frames the incipient circularity in explaining causation in terms of evolution. To make use of evolutionary explanations, we are already talking in terms of causation. It's not mistaken, so much as unsatisfactory.

"This is what I do." — Ludwig V

This is where we might sidestep Wittgenstein and invoke Davidson. We might overcome Hume's passive observation using something like Davidson's interactive process of interpretation; which is itself a development from Wittgenstein's language games. We sidestep the circularity problem by seeing causation not as something to be explained only by invoking causal mechanisms but as something continuously enacted and interpreted in practice.

Added, for @javra: And that is an evolved practice.

Let's see what @Ludwig V says, but it's clear Hume rejected the Aristotelian idea of causation, replacing it with habit and custom.

This is what I at first took T Clark to be saying, here:

My conclusion - identifying one element as the cause of another depends on where you look. What constitutes the cause is a matter of convention, not fact. It works when you can isolate the elements of the phenomena you are studying at from their environments... e.g. if I push the grocery cart it moves. — T Clark

But perhaps not.