Tal's epistemology (and DCP's)

[_Ren]

A Light in the Darkness,

Thanks. From your prompting, I'm starting to realise I have more to learn about Poppers views on induction.
I'm going to read up, and hopefully be able to join back in the conversation.

Till then, I'll lurk and learn.
Cheers.

[_Tarski]

A Light in the Darkness,

Thanks. From your prompting, I'm starting to realise I have more to learn about Poppers views on induction.
I'm going to read up, and hopefully be able to join back in the conversation.

Till then, I'll lurk and learn.
Cheers.

You know enough about what the issues are and you are thoughful so I think you should not drop out. I also tend to forget who said what but the issues are in my mind and I think I can contribute. We are doing philosophy here, as much as, if not more than, the history of philosophy so it's OK to not know exactly which philosophers went down which rabbit holes.
Tal will tell us his version of what went down and then his ideas and we will use our experience and common sense to evaluate.
So keep posting.

[_Ren]

You know enough about what the issues are and you are thoughful so I think you should not drop out. I also tend to forget who said what but the issues are in my mind and I think I can contribute. We are doing philosophy here, as much as, if not more than, the history of philosophy so it's OK to not know exactly which philosophers went down which rabbit holes.
Tal will tell us his version and his ideas and we will use our experience and common sense to evaluate.
So keep posting.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. :)

Here's what I think would really help me get on the same page here...
ALitD - or Tarski or whoever - could you perhaps tackle the Newtonian - Mercury example I was talking about earlier and how, in your mind, it all ties in with induction (and falsification, and whatever other principle...). Basically, what are the lessons to be learned (if any) etc.

I've always used that specific example as one of my main 'frame of references' - and I think it would be helpful to hear how others percieve it...

[_Gadianton]

Popper likened scientific progress to evolution. You can easily see the connections with falsification. And then you can see how the definition of knowledge shifts to a practical one. You might say that modern theories are better than ancient ones in the same way dolphins are superior to worms without demanding one be more true than the other.

Since Popper was a realist and an instrumentalist, he probably wasn't as clear as others in articulating how the definition of knowledge needs to change from its roots in representational theory in order to accommodate a practical definition. Kuhn and Rorty follow Kant in developing an epistemology which puts the world 'under construction' within our heads. For Kuhn, competing paradigms were incommensurable. And this has everything to do with the way humans will think through problems and express their goals. Since knowledge is explicitly tied to how the activities of human communities in Kuhn, it's easy to see that knowledge isn't trivially a reflection of nature in his mind and therefore "the world" in some way follows the mind. Rorty directly attacks history of representational theory and similarily, ties knowledge to linguistic communities (Wittgenstein) and the project of truth is to justify within the community.

So here's one spot where it gets tricky to judge The Gang. We might say out of the three, Popper's failure was the most obvious in the sense that his target was realism and his theory of the progress of knowledge ended up being instrumentalist. Both Kuhn and Rorty found representational theory wanting, hence the traditional definitions of knowledge, and so for them, it will do us no good to grade them against representational certainty and merely label them as relativists and unable to account for the progress of knowledge in representational terms.

[_Tarski]

You know enough about what the issues are and you are thoughful so I think you should not drop out. I also tend to forget who said what but the issues are in my mind and I think I can contribute. We are doing philosophy here, as much as, if not more than, the history of philosophy so it's OK to not know exactly which philosophers went down which rabbit holes.
Tal will tell us his version and his ideas and we will use our experience and common sense to evaluate.
So keep posting.

Thanks for the vote of confidence. :)

Here's what I think would really help me get on the same page here...
ALitD - or Tarski or whoever - could you perhaps tackle the Newtonian - Mercury example I was talking about earlier and how, in your mind, it all ties in with induction (and falsification, and whatever other principle...). Basically, what are the lessons to be learned (if any) etc.

I've always used that specific example as one of my main 'frame of references' - and I think it would be helpful to hear how others percieve it...

One lesson is the extent to which "pure thought" can play a role in hitting on a good theory. Einstien was guided by a feel for mathematical/logical elegance, symmetry/invariance considerations, and a desire to respect certain philosophical principles having to do with galilean relativity of reference frames.
There was this conflict between the space-time symmetries of Newton's mechanical laws and the symmetries of Maxwell's equations.
Einstein resolved the issue, in part, by assuming that the constancy of the speed of light with respect to all inertial frames was a law of nature. This together with the goal of maintianing a relativity principle like that of galileo led him to replace absolute space and absolute time with absolute spacetime. Univerally valid notions of time and simultaneity disappeared. When we say that a body is accelerating, we now know that it is accelerating with respect to absolute spacetime and not with repsect to absolute space. Frankly, I could never make sense out of any of this until I learned differential geometry.
For general relativity he was guided again by some abstract "a priori" principles (the equivalence principle and a desire to maintain the lessons of special relativity).
Frankly, I think the significance of the equivalence principle is misunderstood. It may have led Einstein to the right equations but when the dust cleared we ended up with to different ways of looking at gravity. Experienced frame dependent gravity and gravity as spacetime curvature.

In the first case we say that gravity is experienced if we are accelerating (say inside an accelerating or rotating rocket in space). This can happen even without a mass curving spacetime. It makes sense even in a flat spacetime. This is where the equivalence principle comes in. This kind of "gravity" is frame dependent.
In the second (superior view) we think of gravity as the distortion or curving of space time. If we are in free fall through a curved region of spacetime then we have none of the "experienced" gravity mentioned above but the objective notion of spacetime being curved is a frame dependent reality.
So in my mind, if we say that gravity just is the curvature of spacetime then the equivalence principle does not apply as normally explained. You can't produce that kind of gravity (curvature) just by accelerating.

[_Tarski]

Popper likened scientific progress to evolution. You can easily see the connections with falsification. And then you can see how the definition of knowledge shifts to a practical one. You might say that modern theories are better than ancient ones in the same way dolphins are superior to worms without demanding one be more true than the other.

Since Popper was a realist and an instrumentalist, he probably wasn't as clear as others in articulating how the definition of knowledge needs to change from its roots in representational theory in order to accommodate a practical definition. Kuhn and Rorty follow Kant in developing an epistemology which puts the world 'under construction' within our heads. For Kuhn, competing paradigms were incommensurable. And this has everything to do with the way humans will think through problems and express their goals. Since knowledge is explicitly tied to how the activities of human communities in Kuhn, it's easy to see that knowledge isn't trivially a reflection of nature in his mind and therefore "the world" in some way follows the mind. Rorty directly attacks history of representational theory and similarily, ties knowledge to linguistic communities (Wittgenstein) and the project of truth is to justify within the community.

So here's one spot where it gets tricky to judge The Gang. We might say out of the three, Popper's failure was the most obvious in the sense that his target was realism and his theory of the progress of knowledge ended up being instrumentalist. Both Kuhn and Rorty found representational theory wanting, hence the traditional definitions of knowledge, and so for them, it will do us no good to grade them against representational certainty and merely label them as relativists and unable to account for the progress of knowledge in representational terms.

Hmmm. I kinda thought that Kant was still in the representational tradition. I also would have thought that Rorty didn't even have an epistemology in the same sense that Kant did. Can you amplify a bit more and remind me?--I seem to have forgotten much of what I read about Kant (it was like 25 years ago).

I hope Tal continues today.

[_Gadianton]

Kant is, for sure, I actually didn't mean to say he wasn't. Kant did believe we represent some of the stuff that's out there and we have direct access to that representation. But, from SEP:

Kant does so by holding that (i) scientific laws do involve necessity, but that (ii) this necessity is based not on (purely metaphysical and hence inaccessible) relations between universals, but rather on certain subjective, a priori conditions under which we can experience objects in space and time.

It might be a rather broad connection to make but I mentioned Kant since he's a member of The Gang. Our experience of the world is mitigated in Kant by the categories and in Rorty by what's brought to the table in linguistic communities. As this mitigation becomes more radical, there seems to be a natural departure from representationalism and scientific realism.

[_Tarski]

Kant is, for sure, I actually didn't mean to say he wasn't. Kant did believe we represent some of the stuff that's out there and we have direct access to that representation. But, from SEP:

Kant does so by holding that (I) scientific laws do involve necessity, but that (ii) this necessity is based not on (purely metaphysical and hence inaccessible) relations between universals, but rather on certain subjective, a priori conditions under which we can experience objects in space and time.

It might be a rather broad connection to make but I mentioned Kant since he's a member of The Gang. Our experience of the world is mitigated in Kant by the categories and in Rorty by what's brought to the table in linguistic communities. As this mitigation becomes more radical, there seems to be a natural departure from representationalism and scientific realism.

OK.
I have alway been a bit puzzled by the way Kant talks about these "subjective, a priori conditions" and "categories of human understanding". Sometimes it sounds like he is in for a thoroughgoing idealism and at other times it just sounds like he is saying that the mind (or brain!) uses a certain "vocabulary" or "structured strategy" to make sense out of the world. To say that the mind structures reality with concepts like space and time doesn't seem so earth shattering unless it is supposed to mean that there are no features outside the human mind that answer to these categories. We also use nouns and verbs when thinking about the world but that doesn't mean that trees and gunfights are just in our minds. Even if we talk about space and time as categories of human understanding it would still be true that the universe is structured so as to submit to such categories and that says something about the, ...er um, "noumena".

Heidegger's take on Kant in "The Basic Problems of Phenomenology" seemed a bit different to me than other interpretations. But it's been long enough since I read it that I can't remember exactly why I felt that way.

PS,
hey, am reading this right?
"mitigate"? Did you mean mediate or is this something else I am not familiar with?

[_Gadianton]

Tarski,

Are you saying that Kant's space/time is only really bold and interesting if it's subjective, there being no "real" space and time "out there"? If so, I'd wager up to 5$ that this is in fact what Kant believed.

--yeah, i think i meant "mediate"..

[_Tarski]

Tarski,

Are you saying that Kant's space/time is only really bold and interesting if it's subjective, there being no "real" space and time "out there"? If so, I'd wager up to 5$ that this is in fact what Kant believed.

Well, I don't know but Heidegger taught me to be wary of phrases like "out there" but I keep using them.

Now that I think of it, to the extent that relativity is right then there is no space or time in the way that our intuitions (categories of human understanding?) tell us--- but would Kant have taken an equally idealistic stance toward Lorenztian spacetime?
Most physicist would agree that the mathematics might be our construction but that the mathematics is fitting something quite real and objective that closely "resembles" our mathematical constructs. Notice that the word "resembles" sounds quite representationalist.
(arrh! I am getting a head ache)

What I personally keep coming back to is something like "if we imagine the world in the following way; [insert modern physical theory here] and use the following tools then we can tightly predict a lot of things, more easily come to agreements, and also have a sense of enlightenment and edification.

Space and time are clarified and codified by the use of the mathematics but is it really out there? Well, that's about the point at which it gets sticky since the phrase "out there" both presupposes so much and is ironically less clear in meaning the more one thinks about it. On a gut level I would say, the world is really there and we can really learn to deal with it in a very precise way by thinking in terms of space and time (and spacetime). Am I just a pragmatist? Well, sort of. I am open. On the other hand I refuse to give up objectivity as an ideal.
I think that objectivity and knowledge are real and possible (in an appropriate sense to be continually clarified if possible) but that we are just muddled about how to make things definite and clear for philosophical purposes.
Here is a little article about "truth" that I like: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/faithint.htm

Perhaps my opinion will be clarifed and even altered as the discussion continues.