My only point about induction is that it doesn't prove anything. — Pfhorrest
You'll tend to shrug off some of this as if it's okay to have a general theory and a practical way of applying it -- but that's not okay in this particular domain, as ought to be obvious. — Srap Tasmaner
For instance, how are the background assumptions and theoretical commitments in your big conjunction ordered? Order doesn't matter for conjunctions. In what order are they examined? Is there a method, or is it more like the random 'fishing a belief out of a bag' I had above? — Srap Tasmaner
And what does it mean to examine a background assumption and see if it holds? Is that a logical process or is investigative, gathering more information? — Srap Tasmaner
The point that you seem to be glossing over is that it is on the basis of inductive thinking that we decide which of the range of possibilities we can imagine are "far-fetched". — Janus
There are plenty of people who tell us that they use (and advocate the use of) fideistic methodologies; basically all of "Reformed epistemology" is about that. — Pfhorrest
You always seem to forget that I consider all of the philosophy I'm advocating to be a shoring-up of common sense against badly done philosophy. — Pfhorrest
See the several preceding posts where I discuss parsimony as the rationale behind things like "unwieldy". — Pfhorrest
The rest of those quote snips are either explicitly describing someone else's subjective judgement, or speaking loosely in conversation (assuming that we have some common ground in our casual, on-the-ground opinions, that I can refer to, despite our disagreement on technical philosophical things) and not as part of explicitly defining my philosophical position. — Pfhorrest
unreasonable — Pfhorrest
plausible — Pfhorrest
obvious — Pfhorrest
unwieldy — Pfhorrest — Isaac
basic immutable belief — Isaac
against foundationalism — Isaac
Hang on - are you describing the way our minds actually do work, or advocating a way they should work? — Isaac
are you claiming there's some objective algorithmic method of determining parsimony — Isaac
a first reading of C — Isaac
How do we judge? — Isaac
That is exactly what I mean by fideism. If you think any beliefs are basic and immutable, not subject to question, then that's fideistic. — Pfhorrest
Primarily the latter — Pfhorrest
I think that those basic implicit premises of every argument should be treated as correct, because either “I’m just right and you’re just wrong” (supposing that some answers are unquestionable) or “there’s not really any such thing as right or wrong” (supposing that some questions are unanswerable) are lazy ways to dodge the argument, avoiding the potential of having to change one’s opinions, and so cutting one off from all potential to learn, to improve one’s opinions.
All the rest of my philosophy stems from rejecting those two cop-outs and running with whatever's left. — Pfhorrest
are you claiming there's some objective algorithmic method of determining parsimony — Isaac
Yes, and that is the topic of the next thread I have written up already. — Pfhorrest
a first reading of C — Isaac
This is every bit as subjective judgement as my use of "obvious" for the same purpose earlier. I think you and I, who seem to have similar on-the-ground beliefs despite our philosophical differences, would likely see the same reading as "obvious" / "first", but if "obvious" is too subjective then so is "first reading". — Pfhorrest
We can take an educated guess at whether they're holding B like that or not, though, based on how un-parsimonious a system of beliefs they're willing to construct to excuse the preservation of B. — Pfhorrest
If they're doing all kinds of twisty mental gymnastics full of exceptions upon exceptions to preserve B when it would be much easier to just reject B and leave everything else simple and elegant, that suggests -- though doesn't prove conclusively -- that they're likely unwilling to question B. — Pfhorrest
the important and difficult matters that are raised by your posts. You seem to just want to drag them back to the trivial ground on which you are right, but uninterestingly and uncontroversially so. — Isaac
Like the belief in the truth-preserving property of logic? — Isaac
And yet you claim to have no power other than your own ad hoc reckoning to justify an assertion that anyone does, in fact, think in a fashion other than this method you're expending so much effort advising us all of. — Isaac
As it is, the rest of your philosophy seems to either be trivially true to the point of uselessness — Isaac
Yes, and that is the topic of the next thread I have written up already.
— Pfhorrest
Oh good God, no! — Isaac
Now we can add 'simple' and 'elegant' to our list — Isaac
How do we form beliefs in the first place? "Do something reasonable." How do we apply the rules of the method? "Do something reasonable." How do we decide what belief to drop? "Do something reasonable." How do we gather and weigh new evidence? "Do something reasonable." — Srap Tasmaner
No, that’s something completely different. Basic beliefs are the kinds of things one would use as premises in an argument. The validity of logical inference itself is not something you ever need to put in a premise of an argument, because if you did you would just get an infinite regress: “if P then Q, and P, therefore Q” would have to become “if P then Q, P, and if ‘if P then Q’ and P then Q, therefore Q”, ad infinitum. — Pfhorrest
And other people’s explicit advocacy of methods to the contrary, as I already said. — Pfhorrest
some kinds of beliefs can only be held on fideistic grounds, like if you believe in the kind of God that cannot possibly be detected observationally. So if someone believes in that kind of thing, you know they’re believing it fideistically. — Pfhorrest
My hypothesis is that they arrive at these kinds of unassailable but useless beliefs after they’re challenged in arguments and modify their old beliefs however necessary to avoid “losing”, even if it requires methodologically “cheating”. — Pfhorrest
Besides just not posting, or that one huge 80k-word post, or maybe quarantining all my posts in one General Forrest Thread (should all users be quarantined to one thread like that? Lots of people start lots of threads wherein they repeatedly touch on the same theme; anything by schopenhauer1 is probably anti-natalist for instance), I just don’t know what you want from me. — Pfhorrest
Go ahead and believe something, for any reason or no reason, it doesn’t matter. (This is the “liberal” plank of my system, contra “cynicism”).
When you experience something contrary to what you believed you would experience, change your beliefs, exactly how and why doesn’t matter. (This is the “critical” plank of my system, contra “fideism”).
Repeat forever and you’ll get less and less wrong over time. — Pfhorrest
On my account, epistemic validity just requires that you believe something or other regardless of how little you have to go on, and that you remain willing to change anything you believe when you encounter evidence to the contrary. — Pfhorrest
I don't know how one knows one is willing to revise a belief. Or, perhaps better put, I think people's self-evaluations on such an issue are radically biased.We shouldn't just believe stuff without being willing revise that belief (except stuff like logic which we have to believe on pain of chaos). — Isaac
Beliefs are just tendencies to act as if.... — Isaac
There are things we tend to act as if were the case, these are fundamental beliefs and we don't question them — Isaac
Yes, but we're still discussing whether you have actually shown this. This is another issue we're having here, we're in the middle of disagreeing over whether some issue has been shown and yet you still later refer back to it as if it had. — Isaac
That's not a belief. A belief is a disposition to act as if... Anything less is a meaningless statement and it's pointless to create a model of it, you might as well build castles in the air. — Isaac
So what tests have you carried out to check that hypothesis? — Isaac
There you go, 100 words or so. See if anyone (serious) disagrees, if they don't, let's get on to the interesting stuff. — Isaac
How? I don't see how this process will lead to you being less wrong. It could just as easily lead to you constantly shifting beliefs to favour one experience only to find they now contradict an experience previously modelled well by your theory. — Isaac
So the entire matter rests on a judgement (both third party and introspective) of 'willingness'. Something which is a) entirely subjective, b) scalar, and c) has no proveable zero point as it anticipates future events. — Isaac
If you're happy to let 'willingness' remains something naturalistically obvious to any rational person, I'd have no objection to that, but you have to then concede you have a naturalistic argument, not a logical one. Implicit in this concession is the requirement to absorb that which the proper sciences are showing to be the origins of such natural thought. — Isaac
This may be a root of our disagreement. I do agree that well-formed beliefs are coextensive with "tendencies to act as if...", but there is a broader sense of "belief" that I am also concerned with here, a sense something like "propositions one would assent to". — Pfhorrest
We tend to resist questioning them, sure, but rationally speaking we need to always be open to questioning them if pressed. Look at how many widespread intuitive assumptions about the nature of the world have been overturned in modern theories of physics, for example. If we hadn't been willing to question those things, we wouldn't be where we are now in our understanding of the universe. Our intuitions are frequently wrong, sometimes even our deepest and most securely-held (and widely-shared) intuitions. — Pfhorrest
My point being this isn't a one-sided thing; until the ground is settled, we both think the other is making an unfounded assertion by appealing to that ground, and neither of us is more right or wrong in thinking so, until the ground is settled. IOW I see you as doing the same thing you see me as doing. — Pfhorrest
Well you'll find plenty of people right here on this very forum claiming that God as they conceive of him is not empirically testable. I agree that this is a poor kind of belief, and ultimately claims of that sort are meaningless, but nevertheless people assent to the truth of such meaningless propositions. Showing why that's a useless or erroneous way of thinking is part of the aim of my philosophy.
It seems like you really want to restrict the topic of discussion to the subset of discourse where people are already being fairly reasonable, when all I'm trying to do is show why discourse beyond that subset is useless or erroneous. All the possibilities within the domain you're concerned about discriminating within are already A-OK by me; I'm only concerned with those who wander far outside that domain. — Pfhorrest
Reasoning will never make a Man correct an ill Opinion, which by Reasoning he never acquired — Jonathan Swift
That hypothesis is not central to my project, so it's not something I've researched in any depth, and if the hypothesis turns out false it has no bearing on any of my main points, which are all about why it's counterproductive to do certain things, not what inclines people to do them. — Pfhorrest
I expect most rationalists (e.g. most philosophers) to agree that fideism and nihilism are wrong (but not all of them, of course), yet not to have realized how all three justificationist possibilities (from Agrippa's/Munchausen's Trilemma) inevitably lead to one or the other. — Pfhorrest
Which makes sense, since you're a... neuroscientist? Psychologist? I forget what you do exactly but you study brains in some capacity, no? So it makes sense that you're more concerned with the nitty gritty details of how human brains in particular work. I don't think that's the domain of philosophy -- it's still important work, but not philosophical work -- and I'm focused on the broader philosophical stuff within which that kind of work is conducted. — Pfhorrest
Only if you discard your previous experiences that were modeled well by the old theory, which I assumed was obviously not implied. As you accumulate more and more experiences, the range of possible sets of belief that could still be consistent with all of them narrows. — Pfhorrest
It’s only in the first person that that matter, as one needs to remind themselves to consider all possibilities, even the possibility that one of their most cherished beliefs is false, if they really do care about figuring out what’s true. — Pfhorrest
A naturalistic account of epistemology cannot help but be circular, because to do the natural sciences soundly you need some epistemological account of what soundly done science is — Pfhorrest
What people actually believe and what they publicly assent to (or even self-deceptively assent to in internal verbalisation) are two completely different things with completely different origins and processes, they involve different parts of the brain, they're about as disconnected as it's possible for two mental activities to be. — Isaac
Prior to Einstein humans didn't have a fundamental 'belief' in classical gravity, they had a fundamental belief that when you throw things up in the air they come down in a predictable way, they still do after Einstein. — Isaac
The difference being I haven't written a long series of posts on a public forum under the assumption that other people could benefit from my insight on the matter. That sets the threshold of justification higher for you than for me. You asked me for my opinion (implicitly, by posting on a forum), I never asked you for your, you decided it was important enough for other people to hear. — Isaac
Well then a good place to start would be some quotes or texts in which these philosophers make the case that you're claiming they're mistaken in, or reach conclusions that you're claiming have missed a crucial step. Otherwise it's very difficult to see what you're arguing against. — Isaac
Only if you attend to every single experience you've ever had simultaneously. Which is flat out impossible. — Isaac
Only if you've started from a premise of denying naturalism about truth already. — Isaac
Okay, well part of my position could be phrased in your terms here as "don't assent to things you don't actually believe" — Pfhorrest
I was thinking more of things like the relativity of simultaneity, which is far more counterintuitive than just a different explanation for why things fall down. — Pfhorrest
It's sounding more and more like you think my positions are generally correct, and only object that they are trivially so. — Pfhorrest
The entirety of Descartes Meditations is basically an exercise in this, starting off with a cynical justificationism rejecting everything that can't be positively proven from the ground up, then claiming some beliefs are basic and unquestionable (not just the cogito, which is much more subtle in its flaws, but he basically grounds everything besides his own existence on "God exists and wouldn't let me be deceived"). It's classic foundationalism. — Pfhorrest
Sure, but that just means humans are incapable of perfectly conducting the epistemic process, which is uncontroversially true. Humans are limited and fallible. Saying what they should aim to do doesn’t require that they be capable of doing it perfectly. — Pfhorrest
I object to the implication (resulting from such a long exposition) that there exist people who seriously disagree with you but who do so only because they haven't seen the strength of your argument. If you think these people are irrelevant then it seems petty to disabuse them of the cruxes. If rather, like me, you think these people's purported beliefs can be quite importantly damaging, then it seem crucial to find out exactly why they have them (or pretend to), not just guess at it from your armchair. — Isaac
I strongly disagree. It's absolutely imperative if you're going to advocate a task that the task is either achievable or, if not, then the partially achieved task is worth the effort that must be put into it relative to other methods. We can't fly either, despite the fact that it would be great if we could (save a lot on fuel). Do you think on those grounds alone it would be sensible to advise that we 'keep trying' to fly, just do our best, keep flapping those arms and jumping even if we only get a little bit off the ground because flying would be so great if we achieved it. No. If it is abundantly clear that a method cannot be achieved, then we need to consider the next best alternative - not just assume that a partially achieved version of the first idea will automatically be the next best thing. — Isaac
I'm just pointing out that there is no bottom to stand on and hanging from the sky isn't an option either, so we've got to do something else directly involving the water we're immediately surrounded by instead. — Pfhorrest
You just seem to think this is some use in dealing with people who don't already agree we have to start in the middle, and I don't see how it possibly could be. — Srap Tasmaner
Something else I've had on my mind. It is sometimes said that epistemology is a search for a method that, if followed, would produce two results: (1) believing things that are true; (2) not believing things that are false. Critical rationalism is a claim that we get (1) for free so long as we do (2), at least in the very long run. But that only makes sense for finite sets of beliefs, hence you're inclined to model a person's web of beliefs as a snapshot that is at least arguably finite, on the grounds that it's hard to see how a person could hold an infinite number of beliefs. — Srap Tasmaner
enclosing — Pfhorrest
But more than the amount of modifications, it's about the amount of exceptions to an otherwise more parsimonious system of beliefs. If you have the choice between a parsimonious system plus a huge mountain of exceptions, or a slightly less parsimonious system that's still more parsimonious than the other plus its mountain of exceptions, it's pragmatically more useful to go with the latter.
If we didn't care about parsimony at all, we could always just hold a belief system that consists of an unorganized list of all of the uninterpreted particulars of every experience we've ever had, but that wouldn't mean anything to us, it wouldn't show us any connections between things or highlight any patterns in any way that allows us to usefully interact with the source of those experiences. The whole reason to form theories at all instead of just keeping unorganized lists of experiential minutia is to have that easier-to-use, more-parsimonious abstraction to work with, so it's counterproductive to pick a less-parsimonious explanation when a more-parsimonious one that equally fits the experiences is available. — Pfhorrest
To my way of thinking achieving parsimony is done by weeding out propositions or assumptions that are not grounded in anything other than imagination, association or feeling. — Janus
Earlier, unless I am mistaken, you said somewhere that you wanted to dispense with induction; that critical rationalism does not depend on inductive thought. — Janus
Two hypotheses reached by induction can’t be judged for their relative merits just by finding more things that fit either pattern. You need to instead find something that doesn’t fit at least one of the patterns — which is then into falsification, and so critical rationalism. — Pfhorrest
But you’ve still not verified the alternative, because it’s impossible to ever verify anything, since the verification (or confirmation) process is logically invalid, just affirming the consequent. — Pfhorrest
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