| | 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.)
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