I think it is more likely that theism is the source, not the result, of excessive optimism. To gain that optimism, in the face of the pessimism that might attend the realization of inevitable suffering, loss, injustice and annihilation, some people are drawn to the idea of a transcendent reality. I believe the same impulse is there in the case of Hinduism and Buddhism and most other religions too. — Janus

That's basically what I meant. It's wishful thinking. It would be terrible if X therefore it's not X. How could it be not X? Come up with something, then believe that, because it would be too terrible if that weren't the case and so X could be the case instead.

That's basically straight from the mouth of my devout mother when pressed on the issue. God must exist because it would be just awful if he didn't.

The people you are talking about probably care about their eternal life and well-being. You don't care about that because you don't believe in it. — Janus

I do care about that, I just don't think that they are successfully optimizing their (albeit slim) chances of attaining it, but are instead believing something that tells them it's much easier and more likely for them to attain it because believing that makes them feel good.

If they really don't care whether or not it's actually true, they just want to feel good right now, that's fine with me. I'm not actually very concerned at all with whether people are theists or atheists. Things like that are, to me, merely a sign of a deeper "disease", an indication of probable flaws in reasoning that can have much worse effects (like the mismanagement of COVID-19, climate change, general political and economic injustice, etc) than just allowing someone to reassure themselves in the face of their fears, which is harmless.

So long as those other worse effects aren't manifesting, then I don't especially care about people having their flawed reasoning privately either. But if they care about being technically correct in their thinking -- i.e. if they're interested in philosophy -- then I have some opinions on that topic and arguments to support them. And as a way of forestalling the other worse effects of such flawed thinking, I generally try to encourage people to care about that, i.e. to think philosophically.

I'm talking about scenarios where you have a belief system like "A" plus "A implies B", and then a new belief that "not-B". That is straightforwardly just a logical contradiction, and you have to change something about it on pain of inconsistency. At this point we're not even talking about observational evidence, just pure abstract logic. Whatever your reasons for believing that A, that A implies B, and that not-B, something somewhere in some of those reasons must be wrong, because you just can't have all of those at once. — Pfhorrest

...only there's more going on here than "pure, abstract logic". The new belief that ~B itself requires justification - that is, underdetermination suggests that there is never sufficient reason to accept that ~B. Or, in your terms, there is never sufficient reason to reject the belief that B. There are always alternative explanations.

The point, made by numerous authors, is that falsification gets no further than induction; falsification at first looked promising, but...

Going back to the problem of induction, no list of single observations is ever sufficient to determine a general theorem: "This is a black cat" and "This is a black cat" and so on never determines that "All cats are black"... it is underdetermined. Your variation claims that "All cats are black" is true until we find non-black cat; but there are always ways to reject "This is non-black cat" - it's not a cat, it only appears to be non-black in a certain light, it is a fake, it is a conspiracy. No list of observations is ever sufficient to determine a falsification. Falsification is also underdetermined.

Falsification offers only a pretence to grounding science in "pure, abstract logic". In the end, and this is closer to @Isaac's point, belief is not determined by observation.

The new belief that ~B itself requires justification - that is, underdetermination suggests that there is never sufficient reason to accept that ~B. — Banno

I covered that already:

You could reject not-B, on the grounds that A and that A implies B, and then make all of the subsequent changes to the rest of your beliefs that are required to not demand you accept not-B. — Pfhorrest

Rejecting the new observation is always an option. But then there are other things you would have to reject in order to be consistent about rejecting the new observation. One way or another, you end up having to modify something about your belief system. It's underdetermined what you have to modify but NO DUH it is, and I never said otherwise.

Yeah, OK... So falsificationism doesn't work, and that's NO DUH for you. We have agreement.

So why bother with this thread?

This is non-black cat — Banno

Why didn't you do Hempel? Every non-black non-raven counts as "evidence" that ravens are black.

Logic is swell but it's not the swiss-army-chainsaw it's been taken to be.

If Pf doesn't get Quine, Hemple won't help.

So falsificationism doesn't work — Banno

Only of you ever thought falsification was supposed to prove one particular belief (or set of beliefs) as the sole unique correct one. That was never its point though. It only narrows down the possible sets of beliefs that are still viable. And even if you reject some apparent new observation instead of using it to rule our previously held beliefs, you still have to change other beliefs to accommodate the rejection of that new observation, so you’ve still narrowed down the possibilities, which again is all that was ever supposed to happen.

If Pf doesn't get Quine, Hemple won't help. — Banno

I’m quite aware of Hempel and the good points he makes against confirmationism, which I am also already against.

I think avoiding Hempel is supposed to be one of the strengths of falsificationism, since you claim not to be interested in supporting evidence at all.

In the real world, supporting evidence does matter and people are more or less Bayesian about it.

It only narrows down the possible sets of beliefs that are still viable. — Pfhorrest

Well, no, it doesn't. Not on the basis of "pure, abstract logic" alone.

There's no algorithm for deciding what to believe. If you agree with that, in the face of what you have said here, then we have no disagreement.

Well, no, it doesn't. — Banno

Contradiction is not argument.

You keep claiming things I already agree with somehow refute my views and it’s getting tiresome. All it shows is that you’re arguing against the strawman of what you think I think, not against me.

I'm at a loss to see what your view is. You appeared to set up a thread in defence of falsificationism. You then accepted that falsificationism does not provide a path to belief.

There's no algorithm for deciding what to believe. If you agree with that, in the face of what you have said here, then we have no disagreement. — Banno

I'm at a loss to see what your view is. You appeared to set up a thread in defence of falsificationism. You then accepted that falsificationism does not provide a path to belief. — Banno

My understanding of falsificationism is that it is founded on rejecting the very concept of conclusively proving any one particular belief, in favor of only on narrowing down the range of possible beliefs, which always remains a range, no matter how narrow you make it. Instead of starting with a blank slate of no possibilities and trying to build something up from that tabula rasa, you start out with every possibility live, and then for every argument or bit of evidence you encounter, every relationship between certain ideas you find, you whittle down some possibilities, where your complete belief set can't include this or that kind of feature (e.g. you can't have A and not-B), but there are always still infinitely many ways to avoid that kind of feature (you could reject A to allow not-B, or affirm B to allow A, and in either case rearrange all the rest of your beliefs however is necessary to accommodate rejecting A or affirming B, any way that will enable that, of which there will always be infinitely many).

Saying in response to that "but you never end up forced to accept any particular belief that way" is not a rebuttal of that, it's the whole point of that.

It's like setting upper and lower bounds on some value. That's actually a particular case of this process, but also serves as an analogy for the whole process. You never pin down one actual value, but you can narrow down the range that the actual value might fall within. And that's a kind of knowledge-that. Knowing what combinations of things cannot be so is still knowledge compared to thinking absolutely anything goes because you have as yet no basis to tell what won't work out.

...narrowing down the range of possible beliefs... — Pfhorrest

But it doesn't do this, either; as pointed out.

Bayesian analysis works better.

But it doesn't do this, either; as pointed out. — Banno

But it does, as I pointed out without refutation in turn.

Bayesian analysis works better. — Banno

That is compatible with a falsificationist approach, as I'm going to elaborate in another thread soon, as soon as this one dies. But here's a preview of that part:

Beliefs not yet shown false can still be more or less probable than others, as calculated by methods such as Bayes' theorem. Falsification itself can be considered just an extreme case of showing a belief to have zero probability: if you are frequently observing phenomena that your belief says should be improbable, then that suggests your belief is epistemically improbable (i.e. likely false), and if you ever observe something that your belief says should be impossible, then your belief is epistemically impossible (i.e. certainly false).

Instead of starting with a blank slate of no possibilities and trying to build something up from that tabula rasa, you start out with every possibility live, and then for every argument or bit of evidence you encounter, every relationship between certain ideas you find, you whittle down some possibilities — Pfhorrest

Maybe I missed it, but it's still not clear how this whittling down is done. I get the impulse: if any one of {A,B,C,D,E} explains {x,y,z} and we can rule out B, we've made progress without settling on which of {A,C,D,E} is the best theory much less The Truth. But you need to be able to rule out B, and I'm not sure you've actually shown that you can, given underdetermination.

Can you give an example, real or imagined, but not schematic? For instance, you made it clear to @Janus that you reject theism. Do you consider it falsified? Or just unlikely?

There's no algorithm for deciding what to believe. If you agree with that, in the face of what you have said here, then we have no disagreement. — Banno

How is the existence of a reason to rule it out not also a belief? All you have here is competing beliefs - the belief in A and the belief in a reason to rule out A. — Isaac

This thread went nowhere.

Can you give an example, real or imagined, but not schematic? — Srap Tasmaner

Say you think that doing a certain dance (A) causes it (if A then B) to rain (B). You do that dance, or at least you try to do it right, but it doesn’t seem to rain, at least not when and where you expected the dance would cause it to.

You must either conclude that it did in fact rain in a way consistent with your rain dance theory even though it does not seem like it did to you, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion;

or else conclude that dancing does not cause it to rain, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion;

or else conclude that you did not do the correct dance to cause it to rain, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion.

There's no algorithm for deciding what to believe. If you agree with that, in the face of what you have said here, then we have no disagreement. — Banno

I don’t know if what I’m describing is “algorithmic” in the sense you mean or not.

Ah, the long-requested example. I'll leave this for Srap; he might be able to show the issue in a way that you can see.

Okay, I think I see what you have in mind. But I still don't see how it works.

The new observation entitles you to eliminate something, thus whittling down the number of possible consistent sets of beliefs. Sure, it doesn't tell you which one to eliminate, because of underdetermination, but what matters is not knowing for sure which belief set to eliminate but eliminating one or more. Whittling down will have been achieved.

So when does the actual whittling down happen? As far as I can tell, knowing that you're entitled to eliminate something or many somethings from an effectively unbounded set but not knowing which something -- that might be necessary but it's not the same as actually whittling down.

Stage 1. Your dance->rain hypothesis.
Stage 2. Dance & no rain.
Stage 3. ???

What happens in Stage 3? Anything? Do you just move on to Stage 4, knowing that whenever you like you have several options for filling in Stage 3? Maybe in fact it makes sense to wait, see what else turns up. Maybe Stage 4 will give you a way of picking which Stage 3 whittling-down option (and there are many) is the best. But it'll be just like Stage 3, including the option to disregard the even newer observation entirely.

You do of course have the option at any point of using some completely unrelated method for choosing which whittling-down option to follow. But that hardly seems in the spirit of the thing.

The Quine-Duhem thesis is that it is never a single prediction that is exposed to disconfirmation but the entire theory, the entire framework, right? And then you need further mechanisms to make defensible decisions about what to count as disconfirmed. I have no memory of what Quine says about this, but I suspect it convinced pretty much no one.

Falsification is already in there, isn't it? I know very close to zero about Popper, but I thought his program was to tie the fate of a given theory to specific predictions and expose them to experimental rebuttal one at a time. Fail any single test and the "whole theory" is toast. I assume that the "whole theory" is a structure defined entirely in terms of entailment, and that just looks like a fairy tale. At any rate, this is nothing like underdetermination, is it?

That's basically what I meant. It's wishful thinking. It would be terrible if X therefore it's not X. How could it be not X? Come up with something, then believe that, because it would be too terrible if that weren't the case and so X were the case instead.

That's basically straight from the mouth of my devote mother when pressed on the issue. God must exist because it would be just awful if he didn't. — Pfhorrest

I agree, but I don't say it's necessarily nothing more than wishful thinking even if it is also that. I acknowledge the power of religious and peak experiences to lead people to adopt conceptual frameworks within which they can make sense of such experiences. But I do say that such adoptions are not supported by empirical evidence, logic or mathematics; it's more like the kinds of ideas one might entertain in the fields of the arts, music and poetry, ideas which stimulate the imagination, bring insight, maybe help with the discipline, but should not be understood as propositions that represent any metaphysical knowledge of reality.

So when does the actual whittling down happen? As far as I can tell, knowing that you're entitled to eliminate something or many somethings from an effectively unbounded set but not knowing which something -- that might be necessary but it's not the same as actually whittling down. — Srap Tasmaner

It’s not so much entitled as it is obliged, on pain of inconsistency. Like a car coming at you, you’ve just got to get out of the way somehow, it doesn’t matter which way. Whichever changes seem best fit to make to you, go ahead and make those.

As you say, later observations will require further revisions anyway, so if it turns our you should have revised differently before, you’ll find out eventually.

Whichever changes seem best fit to make to you, go ahead and make those. — Pfhorrest

Feyerabend: Anything goes.

I’m not a fan of Feyerabend (though I’d think you and Isaac would be), but in the case of picking which belief to tentatively hold until you’re obliged to revise again, yeah pretty much anything goes. There’s a reason that in my own terminology critical rationalism is called “criticoliberal epistemology”: it’s the combination of my principles of liberalism and criticism, as applied to belief. It seems to be the principle of criticism that you take objection to, which leaves you with uncritical liberalism, which is just fideism. You don’t think all beliefs are articles of unquestionable faith, differences of which cannot be rationally resolved, now do you?

Like a car coming at you, you’ve just got to get out of the way somehow, it doesn’t matter which way. — Pfhorrest

Okay, yes, and that's satisficing, which means you have a clear goal, a way of deciding whether it's been met, very often a scheme for reducing candidates, and usually a deadline or a plan that definitely produces a decision ("the first thing I find that actually works" is such a plan).

Whichever changes seem best fit to make to you, go ahead and make those. — Pfhorrest

But that's not.

Either you don't really mean "best", and satisficing is fine although we don't know how you're doing it, or you do mean it and you'll have to explain what it is you're supposed to be optimizing and how you'll do that.

To recap: your theory isn't falsification a la Popper but Quine's web of beliefs, and the way you select what to disconfirm when your web becomes inconsistent is -- as yet unclear.

Either you don't really mean "best", and satisficing is fine — Srap Tasmaner

Yes. “Seems best” was speaking loosely. Jump out of the way of that car, in any direction you want, unless you’d be jumping into the way of something else instead. Just get somewhere clear.

To recap: your theory isn't falsification a la Popper but Quine's web of beliefs — Srap Tasmaner

Can you quote me somewhere that Popper says anything contrary to this, because I read Popper first, came away with the impression that he supported what I’m arguing here, then read Quine later and thought “well duh, this is already obvious from a falsificationist point of view, but yeah good points against confirmationism/justificationism anyway.”

ETA: Some quick Googling suggests that later writers like Lakatos have commented on the supposed conflict between Popper and Quine, and Popper himself may have as well (it's not clear from what I'm finding if they're quoting Popper or writing something original), saying that the "falsificationism" that is supposedly destroyed by Duhem-Quine is "naive falsificationism" or "dogmatic falsificationism", and that those are not the falsificationism of Popper himself. So it seems that like I thought, this Quinean attack on falsificationism is an attack on a strawman.

and the way you select what to disconfirm when your web becomes inconsistent is -- as yet unclear. — Srap Tasmaner

And not that important on my account. Just move your position to somewhere not in the way of any incoming problems, where exactly doesn’t matter, just so long as you keep doing that and so keep moving into more and more secure positions.

ETA: Of course, you could always try using falsification itself as a method for deciding. You've got several options, test them out, see if any of them have problems you can find, maybe at least narrow down the options you have to choose between via some other means.

Can you give an example, real or imagined, but not schematic? — Srap Tasmaner


Say you think that doing a certain dance (A) causes it (if A then B) to rain (B). You do that dance, or at least you try to do it right, but it doesn’t seem to rain, at least not when and where you expected the dance would cause it to.

You must either conclude that it did in fact rain in a way consistent with your rain dance theory even though it does not seem like it did to you, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion;

or else conclude that dancing does not cause it to rain, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion;

or else conclude that you did not do the correct dance to cause it to rain, and rearrange whatever beliefs are necessary to accommodate that conclusion. — Pfhorrest

So all three beliefs remain in play. I'm not seeing how you've narrowed the field. You can't have all three together? Is that what you're getting at, that we must choose one and so we've narrowed it from three to one because all three together were contradictory? I'm no Popper expert, but I really don't think this is falsificationism at all.

Regardless of the correct term, it's still very unclear what your target is here. Since an example has proven enlightening, perhaps you could furnish us with another. Who doesn't think like this already? Or are you simply describing normal mental activity?

Can you give an example of some belief which might be held by an actual person where they simultaneously believe that A, and that B, and that A directly entails ~B? as Srap put it

philosophical problems like the subject of this thread just look different if you start from a modern science-aware world-view. — Srap Tasmaner

I'm pretty sure you'll find that even a cursory glance at how beliefs are formed and held in the brain will show you that such a state is nigh on impossible to generate, and for good reason. Nature's already got this one covered. as I said in an earlier post, to assess even as little as ten beliefs in this eliminative fashion would require you to consider 3,628,800 arrangements. Why would you want to even attempt that manually when you have the most complex computing system known to man doing exactly that at 100 hertz?

You can't have all three together? Is that what you're getting at, that we must choose one and so we've narrowed it from three to one because all three together were contradictory? — Isaac

Yes, that is the kind of narrowing I'm talking about.

Who doesn't think like this already? Or are you simply describing normal mental activity? — Isaac

As I said above, there are two parts to this view as I construct it, a "critical" part whereby we can somehow or another find limits to possibilities and separate things that are possible from things that are not, and a "liberal" part which says that you're free to hold beliefs without yet justifying them from the ground up.

The "critical" part is just rationalism generally, and I think that that is mostly a normal and uncontroversial thing, which I'm only talking about because it seemed like you and Banno were questioning that, implying that there is no way of sorting beliefs at all, them all just being held non-rationally and so immune to any rational process of comparison.

The "liberal" part is the thing it seems many people, especially many philosophers and generally self-identified "rational" people, get wrong, and so is the main thrust of the "critical rationalist" / "falsificationist" viewpoint under discussion here. (The point of this thread was not to discuss that viewpoint generally, but just about defining knowledge, especially in light of Gettier problems, in the context of that viewpoint. That's why I started another thread just before you responded, to talk about that topic more generally, for the sake of people who don't care about Gettier etc but might care about this).

The traditional, justificationist form of rationalism treats lack of proof as itself a disproof, which critical rationalism like mine rejects. Lack of proof is just nothing, the starting point, and in absence of proof one way or another, any view is tentatively acceptable, under critical rationalism. Unlike justificationism, which would (a la Descates) demand you reject anything that might possibly not be true, find something at the bottom that is definitely true, and build everything from there, which things like Agrippa's/Munchausen's Trilemma show to be impossible, which would leave you rejecting everything out the gate to begin with and then having no ground to build up from, forever.

Was that directed to me? It seems so.

While you might not be a fan of Feyerabend, you seem to be an - unwilling - fellow traveler. Feyerabend presents the consequences of Popper's line of reasoning, unpalatable as they might be for some.

it seemed like you and Banno were questioning that, implying that there is no way of sorting beliefs at all, them all just being held non-rationally and so immune to any rational process of comparison. — Pfhorrest

Well now I've no idea where to put this response....

Yes, that's entirely what we're saying. Your process isn't 'sorting beliefs' is it. We've just established that. It's pointing out that you ought to do some choosing with those that are contradictory. That isn't actually doing any sorting at all. Falsification does not provide the rational method of comparison, so I don't see how banno and I arguing against it amounts to us saying that beliefs are "immune to any rational process of comparison".

Lack of proof is just nothing, the starting point — Pfhorrest

Repeating it doesn't just make the counter-arguments go away. Lack of proof is not the starting point. It is neurologically impossible to derive a belief without proof and extremely difficult (read impossible for all but the severely mentally ill) to maintain one contrary to all proof.