Tal's epistemology (and DCP's)

[_Tarski]

Tarski, I'm learning a lot from this thread!

Down in the Terrestrial forum, there's a thread about how critics eat Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, and Barrelomonkeys asked someone to do you. I used what I've learned in this thread to show how you like to eat Reese's.

Here's my reply to Barrel's request for someone to do you:

barrelomonkeys wrote:
Someone needs to do Tarski!


KimberlyAnn wrote:
Okay, I'll do him. I did Coffee yesterday, so I can handle Tarski this morning. But, I need to make it clear: I can't do another man until this afternoon. A girl deserves a break, doesn't she?

Tarski: My preferred ratio of what I believe to be chocolate, though I cannot know it's chocolate (but I've ruled out by falsification that it's not something else) to what I believe to be peanut butter, though I cannot know it's peanut butter (but I've ruled out by falsification that it's not mayonnaise or marshmallows or pudding...still a few more things to falsify re: the "supposed" peanut butter) is: (Ch1) (Pb3) = (abcdefghijklmnopyummy).

So, how'd I do? Did I incorporate Popper's philosophy correctly, lol?

Well its funny but the only problem is that I am not really disciple of Popper.

My affection for Dennett would be an easier thing to make fun of.

[_A Light in the Darkness]

As for why Popper is a major figure in the philosophy of science, I can think of three basic answers off the top of my head that probably explain some of this. (Not in the statistical sense Tal, but in the "more reasonable" sense. Try to not let that blow your mind.)

Popper argued effectively against the empiricism of the logical positivists that he exists in reaction to. Getting past logical empiricism is important. Another, more important philosopher, W.V. Quine, is much more effective in this regard, but Popper is a central figure in moving away from their views.

The problem of induction is a serious problem and Popper tapped into a interesting way of addressing it by inventing a whole go around system of justification in falsification. And, while not ultimately successful, he offers a lot of interesting and useful commentary on scientific knowing in defense of his views. If you're wrong in a philosophically interesting way, you'll matter more as a philosopher.

Scientists tend to intuitively see what they do in ways that sometimes corresponds to Popper's views nicely. When a scientist writes a pop article waxing eloquently about how a single experiment can ruin a theory, they are channeling Popper. They're wrong, but they're wrong in an intuitive way.

[_Tarski]

As for why Popper is a major figure in the philosophy of science, I can think of three basic answers off the top of my head that probably explain some of this. (Not in the statistical sense Tal, but in the "more reasonable" sense. Try to not let that blow your mind.)

Popper argued effectively against the empiricism of the logical positivists that he exists in reaction to. Getting past logical empiricism is important. Another, more important philosopher, W.V. Quine, is much more effective in this regard, but Popper is a central figure in moving away from their views.

The problem of induction is a serious problem and Popper tapped into a interesting way of addressing it by inventing a whole go around system of justification in falsification. And, while not ultimately successful, he offers a lot of interesting and useful commentary on scientific knowing in defense of his views. If you're wrong in a philosophically interesting way, you'll matter more as a philosopher.

Scientists tend to intuitively see what they do in ways that sometimes corresponds to Popper's views nicely. When a scientist writes a pop article waxing eloquently about how a single experiment can ruin a theory, they are channeling Popper. They're wrong, but they're wrong in an intuitive way.

and, in rejecting falsificationism as a foundation for science, we in no way deny that falsifiability is a virtue for a theory, conjecture or hypothesis.

[_KimberlyAnn]

Well its funny but the only problem is that I am not really disciple of Popper.

My affection for Dennett would be an easier thing to make fun of.

Hmm, I thought you would have the most affection for Tarski.

I don't know a lot about Dennett, but I'll use what I do know to show how you might eat a Reese's. Oh, by the way, it wasn't my intention to make fun of you, just have fun with you.

How Tarski eats a Reese's: I only eat white chocolate Reese's as it's clear they're Brights. The darkness of milk chocolate Reese's is evidence that they're theistic Dulls!

KA

[_Tal Bachman]

Hi Renegade and "I'm Light, You're Not - And No Wonder, Since I'm Humbler"

I'll take up your comments in my next post, where I was going to deal with things like Popper's strained arguments about theory preference, and his attempt to dodge the fact that we - including him - all calculate probabilities. In the meantime, I ask you to re-read quotes like 1E. That quote, for example, would make it perfectly acceptable to say that one has "scientific knowledge" that (A), even though one may not know - in any sense of 'knowledge' as an end state of belief (that is, in any meaningful sense of the word) - that (A). "I have scientific knowledge that (A)" would be IDENTICAL to "I can only wager the wildest of guesses that (A)". Read his quotes, for Pete's sake - they are a perfect mass of impossibilities and equivocations and confusions. And I could list hundreds more.

And by the way, because Popper argues against the rational basis of calculating a theory's probability, and says that we can never know if our findings are true, and that "all our knowledge is conjectural", and in turn that "conjectures" are "guesses" (meaning unavoidably that for him, "knowledge" of something is identical to a guess about something), he is - test or not - vulnerable on matters like the theory of blood circulation - and beyond that, on every "matter of fact or existence". As he says:

“in fact nothing can be justified or proved (outside of mathematics and logic)”. (C&J, 67). And "nothing" must include the higher probability that "blood theory" is true, over "sand, or diesel fuel, or buckshot, or ignited sulfur, theory".

You guys have the quotes - I didn't make this up. That Popper wishes to escape the icy demands of logic - the unavoidable conclusions of premises which he says are true - by redefining words is his problem, not mine (more on that to come). It is POPPER, for example, who so disembowels the meaning of "knowledge", that he should have no logical basis left for asserting that in no way is it sand, not blood, running through our veins. (I'll take up as I said theory preference next time).

I've produced, I think, enough quotes - now you guys tell me WHY "Conjectures and Refutations" could not, with fullest justification, have been sub-titled by Popper "The Growth of Guesses"! And why that, in turn, would hot have given away just how inadequate his "theory of knowledge" is (given that you're reading this on a computer), or how that, combined with every other relevant argument, does not equal the denial of (K).

Why invent new "outs" for a man who was perfectly happy, time after time after time, to boldly express exactly his views on whether anything can be known, in anything like the sense it must be known for you to be reading these very words on your computer?

Or is it merely guesses out of nowhere - no different than your guess about next week's winning lottery number, except with the difference that, according to Popper, our guesses can only ever retain the status of mere "guesses" (!) - that has enabled man to walk on the moon, transplant his heart, or talk instantly to anyone in the world?

It is all, when boiled down, sheer nonsense. Stay tuned for even more - yes - proof of that.

Still waiting for your quotes on David Brooks's "rabid misogyny", HumbleLight.

[_Tarski]

Tal,

Analyze this:

Newton, studied light extensively. He broke light into color with a prizm and thought deeply about the nature of light.
He decided that light must be composed of particles streaming though space, air and glass.

Thomas Young, in 1803, conducted a series of experiments that showed that light displays all the properties one would expect of wave. Interference, diffraction, refraction etc.

Even more,

1861 Maxwell wrote a four-part publication in the Philosophical Magazine where he descibed how by adding a term to a well know equation and combining the result with 3 other well know equations for electricity and magnetism, he was able to then show that electromagnetic fields could satisfy a wave equation and thereby propogate at the speed of light.

Further experiements confirmed, light was an electromagnetic wave
The question was resolved. Light was a wave. To think otherwise might have seemed almost as insane as denying that blood flowed through our veins. OK, not that insane but...

Then comes the compton effect, the photoelectric effect and well,......quantum field theory and the introduction of the notion of a photon.
Light as a wave faced a challenge no one could have dreamed of after Young and Maxwell.


Does Popper's position really deny that some guesses are absurd? I might conjecture that there are McDonald's hamburgers inside every blackhole. But even before we know much about blackholes this would be absurd. The reason has nothing to do with induction and has to do with (lack of) utility and explanitory power.


One more minor point,
In the sentence of Popper's that you quote where he talks about the Goldbach conjecture, the use of the word theory is not equated with guess or conjecture. The theory of numbers is a stock phrase that means the same thing as number theory and this in turn means roughly the same thing as "The study of the algebraic aspects of numbers". The word theory in this context is not synomomous with hypothesis or conjecture and nothing in Popper's sentence makes me think he believes otherwise.

[Guest]

In the meantime, I ask you to re-read quotes like 1E. That quote, for example, would make it perfectly acceptable to say that one has "scientific knowledge" that (A), even though one may not know - in any sense of 'knowledge' as an end state of belief (that is, in any meaningful sense of the word) - that (A). "I have scientific knowledge that (A)" would be IDENTICAL to "I can only wager the wildest of guesses that (A)".

What you've just said above - at least to my ears - more accurately reflects what Popper meant than the quote I was refering to earlier:

What does it tell us about Popper's conception of "knowledge", I ask, that for him, saying "I know, in a scientific sense, that the earth is round", is entirely compatible with saying, "I do not know, in a scientific sense, that the earth is round"?

The above quote is self contridictory - it uses 'in the scientific sense' on both sides of the comparison. The one at the top of the post doesn't, and therefore isn't contridictory. What the quote at the top of the post essentially says is that scientific theories are no better than wild guesses - under any circumstance. I can see how it would seem quite laughable - and yes, I will agree that it seems to be what Popper is driving towards - worryingly enough.

The way Popper might have imagined it (or at least how I visualise what I think Popper thought) is a bunch of people lined in a row, representing different theories. The people can't ever step forward. Not even one step. But they CAN step backwards. And one by one, as you falsify each theory, each person will step backwards. Leaving (ideally) just one person who hasn't stepped backwards. They now 'stand out' against the others - i.e. you CAN judge between them, but the 'last man standing' doesn't move forward. Essentially, the remaing theory remains a 'guess', But our 'very best' guess, that has survived for X years. But still a guess non-the-less. It never moves forward. At all. Ever.

And let me be clear - I disagree with Popper here. I DO believe that we can have more confidence in theories over time, as more evidence matches it. i.e. I beleive that the person representing a given theory CAN actually step forward. Again, and again, and again.
I'm not particularly interested in 'logically proving' it. Which is lucky, because I would have no clue as to how I would do that. I haven't the first clue how to solve the 'problem of induction'. (In fact, my first step would actually be to even 'understand' the problem of induction, which I'm not convinced I do.)
The problem is, if I can't understand what mistake Newtonians made about (what seemed like) such a simple rule as 'gravity', then who's to say what other fundemental things we are missing about our reality right now...? Or worse, some theories of reality that we are currently EXTREMELY confident about, and yet are leading us on the road to nowhere...?
But then again, I really don't see Newtonian gravity as having 'leading us no-where!'. It was - surely - taking us in the right direction? In all kinds of ways... So rather than dwelling on the fact that Newtonian gravity did give us the wrong impression, and essentially 'hid' (what we now think of as the) 'true' nature of gravity, isn't it more like 'course corrections'? You may over-steer sometimes, but as long as any course correction doesn't take you further away from the truth, then it's all good? You can say that you are getting 'closer to the truth' with each new clarification, or each new detail, or each new 'overhaul' or even 'replacement' of a theory...

Well, again - I may have no strictly logical reason for doing so, but it's the way I like to see it.
I just want a methodology that is 'the most rational' way to analyze truth, when compared to any alternatives. I'm not particularly obsessed with finding the 'one true' methodology that is logically proven to be rational 'all the way to the bottom of the well...'.

I haven't been questioning you on a couple of points to try and claim that I agree with everything Popper said. But I do think you have misrepresented him at least a couple of times. At the very least, he should be judged on the 'overall picture' of what he said.

1E.) "...I suggested that the whole trouble was due to the mistaken assumption that scientific knowledge was a species of knowledge - knowledge in the ordinary sense in which if I know that it is raining, it must be true that it is raining, so that knowledge implies truth. But, I said, what we call 'scientific knowledge' was hypothetical, and often not true, let alone certainly or probably true (in the sense of the calculus of probability). Again, the audience took this for a joke, or a paradox, and they laughed and clapped. I wonder whether there was anybody there who suspected that not only did I seriously hold these views, but that, in due course, they would be widely regarded as commonplace". ("Unended Quest", p. 125-126).

I find the bit I've bolded interesting. I really don't like the way Popper said this. It's pretty confusing. He says that 'scientific knowledge [being] a species of knowledge' is a mistaken assumption, but then goes on to clarify knowledge 'in a certain sense'. Like he's performing two discections of 'knowledge' at the same time. It's confusing. But what I get from it is exactly what I was eluding to earlier:

'Scientific knowledge' is not the same kind, and can NEVER BE the same kind of 'knowledge' as 'absolute' knowledge. And I'm perfectly comfortable with that. I have no problem with that. It doesn't mean that I have no confidence in anything scientific. That's obviously not so. It's just that I'm ready to be proven wrong about - well, pretty much anything at any given time.
That's it. Nothing more. BUt till then, I am perfectly comfortable with having confidence in our most successful theories that have remained unfalsified (at least when compared to any rival theory), and have served us well for many, many years...

“in fact nothing can be justified or proved (outside of mathematics and logic)”. (C&J, 67). And "nothing" must include the higher probability that "blood theory" is true, over "sand, or diesel fuel, or buckshot, or ignited sulfur, theory".

This interperetation isn't justified, given an overview of Popper's words.
Surely the more sensible interperetation is that the "blood theory" itself can not be 'justified' or 'proved', although we can have more confidence in it than other theories that have either been falsified, or could not be even constructed, because we know they would be falsified.

[_Ren]

Now, in seriousness, I have learned a lot from this thread. I must be growing smarter because I read through the posts and was going to make a reply but noticed RenegadeofPhunk had already posted exactly what I was thinking...

I'm not so sure this is an indication that you're getting 'smarter', I'm afraid...!

[_Gadianton]

I read Tal's post and all his Popper quotes. Yeah, Popper denied the possibility of knowing truth and I'd say instrumentalism describes his position as good as any. Whether or not instrumentalism is a tenable position is on the table, but it's begging the question a little bit to insist that unless a certain representational theory of knowledge is how things are then all is lost. The reason Popper went down the path he did in the first place is because no one was solving the problem of induction (not that it's the only problem). If there is no such thing as representational knowledge and our commonsensical notions of knowledge are false, is it wrong to change the definition? Or rather, to start talking about something else instead, like "guessing?" I don't really see the virtue in believing that induction gives us probabilistic certainty just because it seems to be common sense. No one really needs to do deep philosophy at all, science probably won't grind to a halt without it, so we could all just agree on some simple formulation of realism and go on our way. But anyone who digs down is going to get stuck in a mess. I guess the question I still have which I hope you'll answer, is which philosophers should we admire?

Popper, in other words, would argue that YOU would be the irrational one if you wagered that the 1001st toss would also be a six. And he must also argue that no greater probability can be calculated of the 1001st toss turning up six after all of the previous 1000 tosses turned up six, than if there had been a perfectly random distribution of numbers across the thousand tosses, from one to six.

Would he? He was a physicist after all. Again, I think we're riding a fine line here between the philosophy of mathematics/science and the actual practice. Absent solving the problem of induction, every philosophy set out to ground statistical inference will be flawed. In other words, I can believe that it's rational to say we know in the full-fledged sense of the word that human beings have blood. But without being able to solve the problem of induction, that knowledge doesn't follow.

[NorthboundZax]

Does Popper's position really deny that some guesses are absurd?

---Not at all - the problem for Popper is that he cannot admit any rational criterion by which we could say that there are "any positive reasons" for any beliefs about the world. I'm sure he would say that some guesses, in reality, were absurd, or absurdly wrong, and that some guesses were correct. But that is only as much as any person would say. The real point, I think, is what follows.

One of the serious problems that Popper has is that, as in the example I gave of the loaded die, he cannot admit that the prediction that the 1001st toss will turn up six, justifies any greater belief than the prediction that it will turn up two, or than a guess made prior to the very first toss of the die. And that, my friend, is irrational if anything is.

Tarski, I want to suggest with all respect that you are projecting a sort of sanity, a sort of common sense, on to a philosophy which is at heart fundamentally irrational, though cloaked often in the words of rationality. It is no wonder you are doing this, for the claims that Popper really makes, when we step back a bit, seem positively crazy.

This is what "knowledge" is roughly like for Karl Popper. I'll use my Powerball lottery analogy again. You tell me then, if what I am about to describe, with the full support of quotes from Popper himself, has really anything to do with the example you gave about our improving understanding of light.

This is the state we are in as human beings, according to Popper: A lottery number will yet be drawn at random, from an infinity of numbers. We may make a guess at what will be the winning number, but that winning number, if it is even ever drawn, will never, ever be revealed to us. We therefore do not have, and cannot ever have, any rational basis for ever thinking that we have ever guessed correctly, or that our guess is any closer to the winning number than any other guess (save those which, through a test, we might find - 'conjecturally', that is - incorrect). Our relationship to the unknowable number is "knowledge", for Popper (no wonder that he synonymizes "knowledge" with "guess").

I ask, Tarski: Is our predicament in that case really analogous to our predicament with respect to, say, our understanding of light? Is our "knowledge" of light really genetically identical to the "knowledge" pertaining to our selected number?

You see, you and I Have a Light and It's Brighter Than Yours (entirely understandably) talk about the problem of "absolute knowledge". But this is not really what Popper talks about. Because Popper begins by saying that inductive reasoning is invalid, and does not even exist anyway, he is forced to deny that knowledge is of the same species with belief at all, that it is some end state, or hyper-justified, state of belief, for without induction, there can be no spectrum of belief. There can be no admission that an accumulating amount of evidences justifies belief in one theory over one that has NO SUPPORTING EVIDENCE FOR IT AT ALL.

True, he tries to get around this by another long, tortured, assault on the meaning of the word "probability" - but as we have already seen what violence Sir Karl does to words like "knowledge" - entirely eviscerating it of any implication of a rationally inferred grasp of truth, however imperfect or tenuous (and my own words there were even perhaps an overly generous definition of "knowledge") - no one can be surprised that he will destroy any and all concepts, and the words which represent them, only so as to keep on maintaining that there is no such thing as induction. And why would he do this?

Well, getting over what he called "Hume's problem" for him is rather like saving the world. Not seeing that it is not really the problem he thinks it is, he is absolutely convinced that unless it is "solved", that all science, all thought, all reason, all knowledge, is entirely irrational (Hume's conclusion). His solution is to deny that induction exists, but no matter, science doesn't need it anyway - but that leaves him with the evidently impossible task of trying to account for our understanding of the world while maintaining that we only use deductive logic!

Popper describes the stakes this way:

"By these results Hume himself - one of the most rational minds ever - was turned into a sceptic and, at the same time, into a believer: a believer in an irrationalist epistemology. His result that repetition has no power whatever as an argument, although it dominates our cognitive life or our 'understanding', led him to the conclusion that argument or reason plays only a minor role in our understanding. Our 'knowledge' is unmasked as being not only the nature of belief, but of rationally indefensible belief - of an irrational faith".

(Quoting Russell) "'It is therefore important to discover whether there is any answer to Hume within a philosophy that is wholly or mainly empirical. If not, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity. The lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in a minority...'"

Who can save us from this terrible predicament? It's a bird...it's a plane....no.....it's....POPPERMAN!:

"I hope that my discussions...will show that all these clashes disappear if my solution of the problem of induction is accepted". (OK, 5)

"I hope that it will become clear...that no such irrationalist conclusion can be derived from my solution of the problem of induction". (OK, 5)

"Once I had solve the problem of induction..." (OK, 30)

"It was here that I first noticed that induction - the formation of a belief by repetition - is a myth" (OK, 23)

"I think I have solved a major philosophical problem: the problem of induction" (OK, 2).

The solution, of course, was denying in the end that humans or animals even can inductively reason. (The problem was so easy in retrospect - a mere denial, and voila! Kind of reminds me of religious apologists...).

I ask - how could any "theory of knowledge" result in anything other than the grossest irrationalitiess, cloaked or uncloaked, when it denies any validity to, and indeed the existence of, the human brain's use of inductive reasoning to make predictions about the world, to estimate odds, to augment belief, to - in a word - draw inferences from the observed, to the unobserved? Can any account of a spectrum of belief be offered by someone who begins by essentially announcing that we can only think syllogistically?

And is it any wonder that when the burden of belief his philosophy imposes becomes too great - even for Popper - that he must then set about entirely savaging words and concepts like "knowledge" and "discovery" and "truth" so as to paint them with the hues of plausibility? (sorry about the mixed metaphors there...).

A few final gems from Popper on the primary sort of reasoning used by human beings, without which he wouldn't even be alive, since our ancestors would have ALL DIED:

"But this is only to show the unreliability of so-called induction. Genuine induction by repetition does not exist. (OK, 98)

"I believe however that Hume is wrong when he thinks that in practice we make such inferences, on the basis of repetition or habit. I assert that his psychology is primitive. What we do is jump to a conclusion" (OK, 96)

"Induction turns out to play no integral part in epistemology or in the method of science and the growth of knowledge" (sorry, lost the page number and can't find it now).

That human beings and animals inductively infer things is a fact so commonly understood, and so demonstrated in experiments and laboratories and real-life situations, so crucial to our survival in so many ways, that only, I submit, someone very dogmatic - someone who gives no indication anywhere in his corpus that he ever examined Hume's arguments with the scrutinty they deserve - could ever deny it. And that humans and animals very much have a rational basis for induction is also too well-known to need refutation. There is such a things as odds, and they can be calculated, and estimates can be measured, and beliefs attenuated or strengthened and dispositions recalibrated. To argue otherwise is pure nonsense - and has nothing to do with squeamishness about positing the possibility of absolute knowledge. Popper is, as I think I have shown, in a whole other galaxy.

I'll have to respond to your other points later.

T.