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Post 80

Saturday, July 13, 2013 - 12:45pmSanction this postReply
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Elliot,
However, keep in mind that I'm already familiar with standard claims about this and have refutations. To persuade me you'd have to say something new to me. But the situation we're in is that I know a lot more about your epistemology than vice versa. So it'll be hard for you. I think you'd have to learn more about my position before being very effective at arguing with it.
Though I like the spirit of understanding rivals before engaging with them, you boldly say that the situation involves you knowing a lot about my epistemology, but me knowing little about your epistemology -- to which I'd respond: "How do you know that?"

To my mind, there must be some kind of facts and some kind of logic that, when married to each other, create a picture in your head of this lop-sided differential in understandings which supposedly exists between us. First of all, I'm not convinced you know Objectivism all that well. I've been actively studying/debating it for more than a decade. Yet it appears to me as if you are still in your first year. Here's an idea (a bold conjecture), how about I attempt to summarize your epistemology, and then you can tell me whether and where I fell short? If you're game, you could attempt to summarize mine as well, and we could go from there:

Elliot's Epistemology*
Knowledge can grow and even approach the truth, not by amassing supporting evidence, but through an unending cycle of problems, tentative solutions--unjustifiable conjectures--and error elimination; i.e., the vigorous testing of deductive consequences and the refutation of conjectures that fail. Since conjectures are not inferences and refutations are not inductive, there is no inductive inference or inductive logic. Criticism is installed as the hallmark of rationality, and the traditional justificationist insistence on proof and on positive argument is repudiated.

5 key points:
1) knowledge isn't necessarily the truth
2) knowing is tentative and sporadic, always based on currently-experienced problems -- like Dewey and James said
3) induction either doesn't exist or doesn't work if it does exist
4) proof is impossible
5) positive argument is repudiated -- which means you cannot argue for something, only against things, and arguing against things will not ever amount to an argument for something, because there is nothing that can ever be known to be dichotomous (where effectively arguing against the contradiction of an idea, or a sole contrary of an idea, will not be an argument for the opposite of the contradiction, or the alternative to the sole contrary idea)

*Adapted from The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy entry for Popper, Karl Raimund.

Ed


Post 81

Saturday, July 13, 2013 - 3:01pmSanction this postReply
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Two excellent posts, Fred.

Post 82

Saturday, July 13, 2013 - 4:18pmSanction this postReply
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Fred wrote: "If you intend to offer that fictional example up as a suggestion that we should equate on any level acts of consensual procreation -- even, inadvertent, accidental acts of consensual procreation -- with the act of forced association we understand as 'rape' -- or even, be somewhat conflicted or give pause to the ideas, well, not buying it, not even a little bit."

Fred, if you're asking me, I thought I was clear that I disagree with Moore, and the "broken window" fallacy, and nuanced apologetics for rape. But, if not, I disagree with Moore, the "broken window" fallacy, and nuanced apologetics for rape.

(The Rorschach line was the givaway...but if you don't know the story, or the character, my bad.)


(Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/13, 4:20pm)

(Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/13, 5:03pm)


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Post 83

Monday, July 15, 2013 - 9:55amSanction this postReply
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Joe:

My apologies. I am not familiar with WATCHMEN, either the book or the movie, and in retrospect, based on what you did post, it should have been crystal clear to me -you- didn't agree with that argument. I reacted to the content and not your commentary on it.

regards,
Fred




Post 84

Monday, July 15, 2013 - 8:34pmSanction this postReply
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Thanks, Fred; no worries.

Post 85

Sunday, July 28, 2013 - 12:07pmSanction this postReply
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Ed,

> Yet it appears to me as if you are still in your first year. [of studying Objectivism]

lol wrong. it's been around 8 years. now will you start checking your premises more, after being so completely wrong about this?

> If you're game, you could attempt to summarize mine as well, and we could go from there:

Varieties of induction vary a lot between people. I have no way to guess what variety you favor (I've tried to get some clarifications in the discussions but haven't yet succeeded in getting answers to the particular points I regard as important. like how you think support works precisely.). ITOE and OPAR don't clearly specify a particular one, so there's plenty of variance just among Objectivists. (in ITOE, further, Rand denies having a solution to the problem of induction. actually i'm not even clear on whether you think you have a solution to the problem of induction, or not. and how am i to summarize an inductivist epistemology that doesn't have a solution to the problem of induction? if you think you have one, i don't know what it is and can't summarize it. although if you tell it to me i may have heard it before. if you don't think you have a solution to the problem of induction then i don't really understand why the attachment to induction.)

Further, I already did post a statement of part of epistemology summarizing Peikoff. See my "Epistemology Without Weights". The part up to "The Mistake" is a pretty direct summary of Peikoff, written in such a way as not to contradict Popper (which just required extra clarity on a few things).

Elliot's Epistemology*
Knowledge can grow and even approach the truth, not by amassing supporting evidence, but through an unending cycle of problems, tentative solutions--unjustifiable conjectures--and error elimination; i.e., the vigorous testing of deductive consequences and the refutation of conjectures that fail. Since conjectures are not inferences and refutations are not inductive, there is no inductive inference or inductive logic. Criticism is installed as the hallmark of rationality, and the traditional justificationist insistence on proof and on positive argument is repudiated.

5 key points:
1) knowledge isn't necessarily the truth
2) knowing is tentative and sporadic, always based on currently-experienced problems -- like Dewey and James said
3) induction either doesn't exist or doesn't work if it does exist
4) proof is impossible
5) positive argument is repudiated -- which means you cannot argue for something, only against things, and arguing against things will not ever amount to an argument for something, because there is nothing that can ever be known to be dichotomous (where effectively arguing against the contradiction of an idea, or a sole contrary of an idea, will not be an argument for the opposite of the contradiction, or the alternative to the sole contrary idea)


The first problem is that "i.e." which should be "e.g.". Testing deductive implication is one useful method, not the one method.

Point (1) I think is misleading. In general knowledge contains partial truth. For example our current understanding of physics is false as a whole, and will one day be updated by new ideas. But it is knowledge and it contains some various partial truths in it.

Point (2) is too unclear. I wouldn't say knowing is "sporadic" but it really depends how sporadic you mean. Further, knowing isn't based on anything and certainly not on experience(s).

Point (3) is not what we would say. Popper has been qutie clear about this and I agree with him: induction is a myth, no one has ever done it, it's impossible. The counterfactual hypothetical scenario where induction does exist woudl be very hard to analyze because in that imaginary world our epistemology and methods of thinking would not work, so how could we analyze anything?

Point (4) is not how I would say it. I would say that infallibility is impossible. The word "proof" is ambiguous and can be used to refer to fallible arguments sometimes, and to imply infallibility other times.

Point (5) is misleading. One might try to argue it's technically true but basically I reject it. Also your claim about nothing being known to be dichotomous is not one I'd heard before and not part of our position.

I can and do argue for capitalism and various other things. How? By explaining why it's right, how it's useful, what problems it solves, why notable rivals are false, and also why categories of possible rivals won't work. These are all useful legitimate activities. None of these are positive arguments in the bad epistemology sense of trying to "support" capitalism. But they are in line with the common sense understanding that people argue for positions. It's pretty standard stuff that people often do, even if they don't understand the epistemology behind it. So actually Popperian epistemology doesn't clash with existing knowledge as much as point (5) sounds like.


More important than what you wrote in the summary is what you didn't write. I don't think anyone would correctly understand Popperian epistemology from this summary. It's simply got far more content than is included here. You've mostly stated a portion of our conclusions but not really given enough information for people to understand what's going on, why those conclusions are chosen, what all the details are, how it works, etc (Which would be very hard to do in a short piece.)

Post 86

Monday, July 29, 2013 - 1:13amSanction this postReply
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"Induction" needs to be defined here.

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