Hume and legitimate beliefs
I am trying to understand legitimate beliefs in Hume and their relationship to scepticism.
In Hume, legitimate beliefs exist. They occur in a process of recurrent association. A belief is legitimate when it is associated with a vivid impression. For example, the belief that one object will move after another is based on past experience of their constant conjunction. Hume concluded that fundamental beliefs, such as the existence of an external world or the existence of the self, are not rationally justifiable but are legitimate because they are the result of experience and custom.
However, I wonder: what makes them legitimate if they are not justified by reason?
In Hume, legitimate beliefs exist. They occur in a process of recurrent association. A belief is legitimate when it is associated with a vivid impression. For example, the belief that one object will move after another is based on past experience of their constant conjunction. Hume concluded that fundamental beliefs, such as the existence of an external world or the existence of the self, are not rationally justifiable but are legitimate because they are the result of experience and custom.
However, I wonder: what makes them legitimate if they are not justified by reason?
Comments (409)
Nothing. What makes the notion of legitimate coherent and applicable divorced from reason? Nothing.
If you believe as Hume does that constant conjunction has little or nothing to do with necessary connection, then belief in the necessary connection between two constantly conjoined things, is fancy, or practical for now, or whatever else you want to believe about it. Its not actually true or actually legitimate.
Ask Hume, what do vivid impressions cause? He has to say stop asking stupid questions. But to impress is to transfer something, from one, to another. Light impresses itself upon my eyeballs. Do my eyeballs and the light cause anything? Or do I just constantly connect them to my visions out of habit (cant say force of habit because force sounds like a cause)? He had to say that light and eyeballs dont cause - causation is a figment of our minds. But for some reason he allows constant conjunction and recurrent association to be prior to a judgment of belief - like a cause is prior to some effect. (I guess if we just avoid using the word cause and stand on recurrent we can lift up a rational conclusion of legitimacy - without sounding as naive as people who still believe and say cause and believe they actually know something about the world.)
I agree with Hume that cause itself is a metaphysical concept. But I agree with Aristotle that metaphysical concepts, formal causes, exist - minds alone can sense or grasp or discern or understand or constitute, or believe them
It is surprising to me that we can survive with these kinds of beliefs that are imposed on us most of the time. Of course, this is assuming that truth is subsumed by reason. We are beings who live in constant ignorance of truth and reality. I would say that these beliefs work on a practical level, but I wonder how they can work at all. It seems that another belief underpins legitimacy: that the external world is regular. But we are back where we started, as this belief is also illegitimate.
So, you cant trust induction, so just act as if you can. After all, what else are you going to do? Seems kind of a cheat. Its not rational, but its legitimate. What other use is there for rationality other than to help us figure out what to do?
That is the pragmatic position. The world seems to be ordinary, and we act accordingly. But a philosopher pauses and asks about rational truth. Pausing seems like a suspension of everyday action and pragmatism, the things to be done. There is a relationship between the philosopher's contemplation (pausing) and not following inductive everyday life, if one can say such a thing. Can it be said that philosophy has classically rejected this more fragile aspect of empiricism? Heidegger spoke of an authentic and inauthentic mode of existence. I believe there is a relationship between philosophical thinking, rejecting everyday life and this authenticity, but it is not yet very clear to me.
Gambler's fallacy? :chin:
I don't think anyone has ever rolled the same number 1,000 times in a row. But apparently, it's just as likely as rolling the dice 1,000 times and at least one of those times being different than the next.
Given every morning of my life (that's more than 1,000) the sun has risen. Habit leads me to expect it to rise tomorrow. Now justify the doubt. Something like "I saw the devourer of suns starting to consume it last evening", perhaps?
And what claim was that? I'm fairly certain it can be proven no person has ever rolled a dye 1,000 times with the exact same result each time. If you put 6 people, each with a six-sided dye in a room, and instruct them to roll the dye 1,000 times, at least one of those 6 people should have a fair chance of rolling the same number every single one of those 1,000 times. Yet that never happens. That leads people, if not falsely, to believe, anything can happen, just because the same thing happened before. But that was a minor piece of commentary and not a claim or argument. That is as follows, next.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, that's reasonable. One with a mind to argue might say such an example is "low hanging fruit". Of course the Sun, a planetary body described by millions of people across thousands of years that has been doing the same thing will probably do the same thing tomorrow. But what does that have to do with non-physical concepts? There's the clear distinction between philosophy and science. Science would be, "if you touch that open flame, your skin will burn or blister." A person who doesn't know what fire is, may, rationally, mind you, doubt that. Until proven. They've never touched fire before, and perhaps they've never been burned or blistered. Without knowledge of the situation, doing such, and resulting in injury, wasn't (relatively) foolish. It was simply dangerous. A result of ignorance. Something we are all born with, and at least in some aspects of life, will die with.
Philosophy, on the other hand, attempts to reach at things a bit non-physical. Such as the mind, emotion, the sense of identity, and purpose. Things that can't be measured by your science. Doubting a metaphysical position is easier to justify than doubting a physical scientific one, for obvious reasons. Which stands to reason, the burden or "minimal quality" of proof, doesn't have to fit every single person's understanding to be valid (unlike science). Basically, comparing one's doubt in philosophy is nothing like doubting whether the Sun will rise tomorrow. At least, not generally let alone automatically.
I don't see the value in this kind of distinction. How do you see it?
Don't ask me why I said "certainty". Hume also discusses illegitimate beliefs. These consist purely of imagination and lead us to fictions because they are not based on habit. Among these illegitimate beliefs are the ideas of traditional metaphysics, such as causality as a necessary rational connection.
You don't see the value of the distinction between rational and irrational? Or memory and imagination?
:gasp:
So, if all we have access to is appearances, what then is the relationship between appearances and reality? Hume bars speculation here. Any knowledge of the relationship would need to come to us through appearances themselves, but then appearances, in being appearances, can never inform us as to this question. Appearances might be arbitrarily or only accidentally related to reality (consider the arguments against causality).
It should be obvious from this starting point that skepticism cannot be escaped if we accept the premises. At no point are we ever in contact with reality, and any relationship between reality and the appearances we do have access to is forever obscured.
The question then is, should we accept Hume's anthropology and psychology and his metaphysics of appearances? I don't think we should. For one, he doesn't really argue for it; he merely assets it as obvious, e.g., in Book II (and then refers to this assertion as a "proof" going forward, e.g. 3.1.1.8). But it isn't obvious. A great many thinkers have disagreed here, including almost everyone prior to the Enlightenment (plus plenty since).
A problem for Hume here is that, per his own epistemology, he cannot possibly know what he is asserting here. He cannot know the reality of how the mind works for the same reason he cannot know causes in the classical sense, etc. Not only that, but he doesn't even have any strong probabilistic warrant here, just an appeal to "shrugging and going back to billiards." Is it more "pragmatic" to believe Hume here though? Certainly, he cannot claim that he is "more likely" to be right based on inductive inference. He arguably is cutting off the branch he sits on, giving himself no warrant for asserting a hotly contested set of premises.
Now, to be fair, this inability to justify his own claims is exactly what we should expect if he is correct, but that hardly neutralizes the way in which the epistemology is self-undermining. We might also think that, prima facie, an epistemology that cannot justify even our most bedrock beliefs is likely to be a defective epistemology. Hume and the many who follow him normally justify these fairly radical claims by making them seem to be paragons of humility. However, arguing for the ignorance of all from one's own ignorance is arguably quite a presumption.
Second, we should take a good hard look at any philosophy that demands an appearances versus reality distinction but then denies access to reality. If "reality" is inaccessible, then we have no warrant for positing it. Only appearances show up. But if there are only appearances, then appearances just are reality.
Third, if appearances are arbitrarily related to what they are supposedly "appearances of," then they aren't actually appearances of those things in any meaningful sense. We might as well call them free floating, spontaneous, uncaused apparitions if we're going to deny that there is a reality that is in any way the causes of appearances (and no, I don't think the Kantian "limiting relation" is strong enough to secure status of "appearances" as appearance; it is just the spectral relation that is left by the sheer dogmatic presupposition that "phenomena" are "appearances of").
Which, ironically, makes experience something of a miracle.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Can you explain that further?
Maybe Hume just didnt get into it? But I could see our experience of our own mind being different than our sense based experience. (I guess that is what Kant did.).
But consider Russell's Turkey. The turkey knows from a lifetime of experience that every morning the nice man comes to feed him at sunrise. This correlation has never failed; it is as regular as the rising sun. And yet on Thanksgiving morning, when the man comes for the turkey, he isn't planning on feeding him...
The doubt is justified on similar grounds. Might we be like the turkey? You might "remember" the sun always rising, but in virtue of what do you know that your memory is reliable? Plus, given Hume's disjoint bundle anthropology, the reliability of memory is perhaps more open to doubt.
Quoting Fire Ologist
Hume gives a very specific narrative of how the mind and consciousness works, from which the skeptical arguments follow. But such a narrative itself presupposes the reliability of his own memory and introspection, induction, and indeed his own knowledge of a causal relationship between impressions and idea formation, as well knowledge of a cause-like computational role for reason.
And consider his objection to the idea that reason has direct access to reality or that the actuality of what is known must, in some sense, be "in" the knower. If this is dismissed as "metaphysical speculation" only because, "we could only know such through impressions, which are merely appearances, and there is no knowable relationship between appearances and reality," that simply begs the question.
I think Hume's argument hangs on the appearance of humility here. To be sure, he is saying that most of the past thinkers of East and West are grievously mistaken, but he isn't saying their beliefs are false, just that they cannot be known to be true. Yet this applies just as much to Hume's own narrative of how the mind works, which is what justifies this skepticism. Hence, what we have is an argument to global gnosis about the limits of knowledge made from a position of ignorance.
Arguably, when we see a rock shatter a window, we are experiencing a cause. Likewise, when we encounter evil, we are experiencing it. Hume thinks we cannot be experiencing what we think we are experiencing. But it is helpful to turn around and ask what [I]would[/I] constitute the experience of a cause? If we had a discrete "cause sense" like smell, and experienced it when a rock smashed a window, surely Hume would just dismiss this as mere appearance as well. So there is actually no evidence that can falsify Hume here; the conclusion that we cannot experience causes is axiomatic, which just brings us back to why we ought to accept his axioms. It's important that his axioms don't just limit us to the senses (after all, the Peripatetic Axiom: "whatever is in the intellect is first in the senses" doesn't result in these consequences) but also declare what can be known through the senses a priori.
This is more obvious when we get to his claim that we never experienced vice or evil in Book III. Arguably, we do. What else is disgust, outrage, pain, etc.? These are surely sensations. And pain is a sensation that is continuous with touch and hearing. So why can we not sense badness? Again, it's axiomatic that these sensations are internal (and in a certain sense, all sensation is internal because it only deals in appearances).
Quoting Fire Ologist
I don't see how this helps. In virtue of what is Hume's introspection more right than those of pre-modern thinkers or modern phenomenologists, etc. such that we should dismiss their understanding of how the mind works and accept Hume's? Consider also the idea that the act of understanding is luminous (reflexive). Hume can deny this on the grounds of introspection, but why ought we believe he introspects more correctly than his opponents?
Suppose I am standing before a person who says Let there be fish! and, before my eyes, dozens of fish appear out of nowhere. Ive eliminated other possibilities: its not a magic trick, theres a large crowd of people with me seeing the same thing, and Im not hallucinating. Suppose I've narrowed it down to two remaining explanations:
A genuine miracle is occurring a supernatural violation of natural laws, or I am probably in a universe (within an infinite multiverse) where an extraordinarily improbable natural fluctuation say, a Boltzmann fish scenario has spontaneously produced the fish.
If I I think I probably live in a multiverse, which explanation would Hume think I should favor?
Humes idea of legitimate belief is not irrational. If anything its non-rational. Very few of our beliefs are rational. Even fewer are irrational. The large majority are non-rational. Rational belief comes into play when a monkey wrench gets thrown in the machinery.
Quoting unenlightened
I dont understand how this is relevant.
If the natural world produced life, and evolved a consciousness that mediated interaction with the world, it seems that this would entail an innate sense that this world is external to the organism. This would make it a a properly basic belief - which are rational to have and maintain, unless defeated. This entails a non-doxastic justification.
Is it? Do you doubt it on any of those grounds? Want to put some money on it? :wink:
This is Wittgenstein's suggestion. There might be reasons such as these on particular occasions and in particular circumstances. But because my memory is sometimes unreliable does not mean that I can or should never rely on it, because even the interpretation of immediate sense data relies on memory, and thus there is nothing at all without it. And Hume is similarly complacent in practice about such matters.
It seems to me the reliance on memory you are talking about is rational. So, whats the problem?
The problem is that it is not rational, in the sense that no amount of past evidence can constrain the future in any way, logically. And you just saying it seems rational does not make it so either. It goes something like this:
The future will be similar to the past because in the past, the future was usually similar to the past, and the future will be similar to the past, because it generally was in the past, so it will be in the future.
Repeat without rinsing until convinced.
So lets say you and I are sitting out on my front porch drinking whiskey sours. I live on a pretty busy road so cars are going by often. Lets say every 30 seconds. We sit there for 10 minutes or so watching cars go by and keeping track. During that time 20 cars go by. Fifteen of them have Massachusetts plates, two have Rhode Island plates, and three have New Hampshire plates.
Then I say Ill bet you $50 the next car will have Rhode Island plates? You say sure. Id say your decision to take that bet was rational.
So, imagine a world where the future is not always like the past.
You are watching a film, Death in Venice, say, and somewhere in the middle, it cuts to the middle of Bambi, and then it starts jumping every frame to a different movie, so that there is just a meaningless flicker of images changing without connection and too fast to even identify.
But there is still a continuity, which is the person watching.
So now remove that continuity, such that each frame, is seen by a different person. Now there is no continuity, but there is a problem: without any continuity, there is nothing to say one frame comes before or after another; there is no temporal order of past and future, just a heap of random watchers of random frames with no connection at all.
In other words, if the future fails to be connected to the past and related to it, it fails to be the future. The future is necessarily similar to the past, otherwise it is not the future. The timeline has to hold together, or else it is broken, and a broken timeline is not a timeline at all.
Too late, you already took the bet. The question is was your decision rational? If you say no, its kind of hard to take your argument seriously.
Quoting unenlightened
I dont have to imagine it, I live in the world where the future is not always like The past.
Quoting unenlightened
Sorry, I really dont understand this argument
I'll just leave it there, and see if it appeals to anyone else. I think you didn't understand Hume's problem in the first place, so an argument that addresses it might likely be rather opaque.
You still havent answered my question. Would your decision to take the bet be rational?
I have already explained why it would not have been rational, viz. that your offering the bet in circumstances where you had expertise that I lacked, especially when you had been plying me with alcohol made me suspect a scam. Thus I had legitimate Wittgensteinian reasons for doubt in the particular circumstances.
This is why we pragmatists rule the world.
You provided rational reasons not take the bet. But another person might very well take the bet, on the basis of the probability and some good reasons to be confident he wasn't being scammed - that would be rational also.
So rationality doesn't work as a decision guide.
That does not follow. Rationality is not an oracle guaranteed to lead to a truth. But rationality is more likely to lead to truth than irrationality.
We rarely have enough information to prove something true beyond all doubt, so navigating through life entails making informed, rational predictions and decisions. Occasionally, wild guesses work out, but informed, rational decisions are more apt to do so. Example: for any given vaccine, it's possible it will do more harm than good, but we can look at studies (or trust those who've done so) to weight the good vs the bad.
I would go a step further. It would be irrational not to do things the way youve described.
My rationality or yours?
You can only employ your own rationality, and I can only employ mine.
Your rationality is more likely to lead you to conclusions that are consistent with your background beliefs. If those background beliefs are true, they will be directed toward truth. The same applies to me.
Suppose you and I reach different conclusions. We could then both profit from having a discussion to identify differences in background beliefs and the reasoning we each employed. We may then adjust our beliefs and/or revise the sort of reasoning we employ.
That is what we are doing - having a discussion. You have taken the bet, and I have rejected the bet and we have laid out our reasons. Now I hope you will agree that the actual outcome is not decisive in this case. neither of us is entirely certain in our estimation of the odds, and even if we were, we might still be unlucky. We could do a much more detailed survey of the number plates that pass @T Clark's house, to see if there are patterns in the data and what the relative frequencies are over time. And perhaps a psychological assessment would be helpful in determining whether he is an inveterate gambler with very poor judgement, or a kindly chap that wants to give away some money without causing the beneficiaries any embarrassment, or a trickster, or something else.
But as things stand, we have made different decisions based on different rationales and the information we have.
Therefore, rationality is not decisive in this case. And if it turns out that we are all turkeys, and tomorrow is thanksgiving, then our reasoning about the kindly farmer that feeds us every day will be completely and catastrophically wrong; and perhaps the sun will not rise tomorrow because we are living in a simulation that is about to be turned off.
But what I have not seen in all this pragmatism is any answer to Hume. His claim is that one of our "background beliefs" seems to be that the future will be broadly the same as the past, and this is something we cannot have any evidence of whatsoever because the future is always beyond our experience. It is therefore plucked out of the total vacuum of unknowability and it is on this literally unreasonable assumption that all this "pragmatic rationality" is founded.
This principle applies just as much to probabilities and statistics like car number plates as to the orderly procession of the heavens and the rising of the sun. 'These are the plates we have seen -therefore these are the likely plates we will see next. But the 'therefore' has ZERO justification in logic or evidence. It's called "The problem of Induction". This is what you are calling 'rationality'.
This is a truly bizarre argument. I give up.
But rationality WAS decisive for both of us. Contrast our rational choices with IRRATIONAL means of making a choice: basing it on the alignment of the planets, consulting a Ouija board, or basing it on an inscription in a fortune cookie.
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, and that would have been even better, but in our example it's not worth the effort. In other cases, it might be worth the effort, but we don't have the time. But in all cases, we can make a rational choice based on the imperfect set of information that we have.
Quoting unenlightened
Here's how I approach it: some explanation is needed for the constant conjunction of past regularities. I judge that the "inference to best explanation" for this is that there exist laws of nature that necessitate this behavior. Inferring a best explanation is rational - it's a form of abductive reasoning.
So what's the alternative? Remain agnostic based SOLELY on the possibility that there will be some future "black swan" event? What's wrong with that is that it is no more than a bare possibility (i.e. it's logically possible, but lacks evidence or any other rational basis for considering it more than that). If you're going to withhold judgement on EVERYTHING on the basis that it's logically possible that you're wrong, you'll be completely indecisive about everything in life. If you only apply this extreme skepticism selectively, then you are being inconsistent - which is irrational.
With the strictest definition of knowledge (belief that's true, and justified so strongly as to eliminate the possibility of being wrong), almost nothing is truly knowable - so it's a pointless goal. It's perfectly reasonable to commit on our judgments. Surely you do this in everyday life.
That is indeed a fine and attractive explanation for past regularities, and "as a rule" I myself have found that heads and tails come up about equally, and so on. But what leads you to apply this rule of the past to the future?
Quoting Relativist
Indeed. And you call this 'rationality'? Not 'desperation'?
Check out Goodman's new riddle of induction if you haven't already. It's fun.
Attribute regularities to will rather than law, maybe.
Same answer: it's a law of nature, and laws entail necessity. I'll clarify what I mean by a law: it is a relation between two TYPES of things (or among several types of things). Electron A repels Electron B because it is a law that "-1 electric charges" induce that repulsion. Any instance of 2 electrons, anywhere in time, would necessarily have that effect.
Quoting unenlightened
Suppose you have a retirement account and you're trying to invest the money to grow large enough to enable you to one day retire. Would you consider taking guidance from astrology, fortune cookies, and California Psychics? If not, why not - if all "rational" choices are simply acts of desperation?
This seems like kind of an arrogant and righteous comment.
Why think that, other than that it's possible?
Yes, darling, but that's my comment, not Hume's.I am arrogant and righteous, so you can dismiss me with a casual projection like that.
Hume's view have been challenged by a number of philosophers. I'm just borrowing from them. A good exposition of this is in Causation (edited by Sosa & Tooley).
(A few years ago, I found a link to a PDF of it, so I have a copy).
Here's a link to an article by Tooley.
"All swans are white" is a necessary truth if swans are defined as "white aquatic birds with long necks and xyz". But let's suppose someone inferred it a law of nature that whiteness was physically necessary in birds with some set of other characteristics. First, I wonder how that would be justified, but let's just assume there was a good justification. The discovery of a black swan would falsify that theory and lead to theory revision. What exactly is the problem with that? Would you toss out the teaching of science on the basis that every theory is provisional and there's always a chance it will be someday disproven?
Ive been thinking about this and Im not sure youre right. I guess it depends on whether he didnt take the bet because he really thought the odds were against him or because Hume said he shouldnt.
All the evidence we have points to the conclusion that the future will be broadly like the past. Hume was, in my view, merely pointing out that this is not a deductively certain conclusion. It is rational to take past experience as a guide to predicting what the future might be like, simply because there is no other guide.
It is not, to put it in Kantian terms, pure reason which is at work in this, but practical reason. Whether nature's apparent laws are truly necessary laws or merely acquired habits, it doesn't matter. Even if they are merely habits, it still takes a lot to change a habit, for us as well as nature. It is arguably more rational, in general although of course there are exceptions, to stick to our habits, provided they really are rational, that is well-considered, ones.
Overuse of resources, environmental pollution and habitat destruction do not count as rational well-considered habits, even though we may not be able to be deductively certain that they won't somehow magically renew themselves.
It made sense to me. This same basic problems shows up for any metaphysics of sheer difference. If everything is completely different in each "moment" then you don't have "different moments" in any sort of whole, but just sui generis, unrelated "beings" plural. I think this applies for any attempt to eliminated causality as well.
I have a quote I like to use here, which maybe will find helpful:
It makes a bit more sense if you're familiar with Borges' story Funes the Memorious though. The basic idea is a guy who can remember everything perfectly. He can spend 24 hours remembering and basically relive the same day at will. Because of this, he finds language incredibly inefficient and confusing. Why speak of "clouds" when you can speak of "that particular cloud on the morning of November 8th, 1928?" And why speak of that same cloud early in the morning before the sun hit it as the same thing as the cloud once the sun illumined it? They can all be held absolutely distinct.
The fact that skeptics don't act with the courage of their convictions has been pointed out since ancient Greece and India, but I am not sure if this diffuses the general challenge. The skeptic's point is not generally that we ought to go walk off a precipice, etc. In practice, they normally use the impossibility of justification "pragmatically" themselves. For example, if one thinks it is impossible to ever justify any claims about morality and ethics, it's pretty easy to use this skepticism selectively in self-serving ways. In many ways, absolute misology is less threatening than "pragmatic" misology. The former, a sort of absolute epistemic nihilism, is at least obviously ridiculous. The true ruin of reason lies in selective adherence. That's why I think appeals to "pragmatism" can often be the worst sort of solutions to skepticism.
At any rate, this sort of skepticism comes up in plenty of places. The Boltzmann Brain and various variants, particularly those involving a "Many Worlds Hypothesis" are a good example where the conclusion of radical skepticism can come through surprising paths. But of course, these also tend to be self-undermining in that, if we think we are likely to be "randomly generated" we ought not trust this very belief itself, since random beliefs will not tend to be true given that there are always vastly more ways to be wrong than right.
Quoting RogueAI
Ha, a good question! If you begin to see miracles, even deeply personal ones, you should probably just accept that these necessarily happen in some part of the wave function with a probability of 100%, so why not "here?" Likewise, quantum immortality is a reality, so you probably should be concerned about ending up in one of the innumerable paradise timelines instead of the damnation ones (not that you can help it, both will inevitably happen, regardless of your sins or karma). It also follows that Jesus certainly did rise, "somewhere," so there is that.
Lots of silly things result from Many Worlds. That it has become popular as a "solution" to the Fine Tuning Problem to me is sort of baffling. To my mind, it represents an essentially religious commitment to the essentially aesthetic ideals of "naturalism" to posit "everything possible happens" as a solution to the threat of life seeming vanishingly unlikely otherwise.
As usual, I enjoyed your interesting post. It does just strengthen my understanding that the way you see the world and the way I do are not compatible. Ill use my new favorite word againincommensurable.
I looked back over all my posts in this thread and the responses to them. The only question on the table as far as I can tell is whether or not relying on memory is rational. That seems like a very simple and straightforward judgment to make. I would even say obvious. Clearly you and. @unenlightened disagree with me on that.
But if we don't live in a sufficiently large multiverse, doesn't fine-tuning become a serious problem for the person favoring naturalism? The best science at the moment is that we beat some very long odds just being in a universe that supports life.
What is objectionable about this, is not just that it fails as any kind of defence of the rationality of induction, but that it takes astrology - the attempt to relate celestial regularities to human affairs as the opposite of pragmatism rather than the exact same principle and the father of science. Pragmatically, the origins of agriculture were founded on the connection of celestial events to the seasons and thereby to human affairs.
This is the desperation, to attempt to defend one's rationality by projecting one's irrationality. That and taking money and property owning to be an immutable reality rather than a fragile social construct. Who knows, next week Trump might pass a law that anyone he doesn't like forfeits all their assets and gets deported to Greenland. My advice for a secure retirement is to head for the hills and stock up on canned food and iodine tablets.
We use the past to predict the future because ...
Quoting Janus
The difference between us is that you call that rational, and I call it desperation. We are desperate to predict because we want security, and there is no security. Such is the fall into knowledge.
Could the same point be made by saying instead Hume uses anthropology/psychology to justify his skeptical positions.? This leaves open the question of whether his anthropology/psychology was any good to actually justify his skepticism.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I dont agree with Humes conclusions.
When I said experience of our own mind being different than our sense experience I was precisely referring to the fact of reflection in the mind (luminous understanding). Sense impression as a basis for all mental reflection is a great empirically based theory, but Hume was too enamored of this theory. Knowing the mind and ideas is just different than knowing a sense object. Knowing qua knowing is not merely knowing qua sensing. What the eye and brain do when seeing is analogous to what the mind does in itself when reflecting, but its only an analogy. From what I can tell, one needs a completely different mechanism (epistemology that involves essences) to explain reflection, not just one involving Humes faded recollections.
How do you mean Hume can deny this on the grounds of introspection?
Hume didnt explain habitualness. Hume didnt satisfactorily explain whatever might make some habit more functional than another - he just asserted we had no way to know this. Its great how the billiard balls moved the way he predicted, but he ultimately wasnt talking about billiard balls when he made any predictions, since their existence and behavior were experiences of his sense perceptions, not experiences of any thing in the world on which these sense impressions were verifiably (justifiably) based.
How different is the picture Hume ultimately creates than the picture Plato creates of the man chained in the cave seeing shadows of things, but not seeing things? Plato just added the possibility of breaking free of the chains. And I would say, an act of reflection itself involves some break from the pre-reflective, chained self that seeks to know.
I wasn't addressing induction. I was addressing rationality in general. I addressed induction in another post, and quote it below.
Quoting unenlightened
I gave examples of guidance that most people would consider poor bases for a decision. This was to show that, at least at the extremes, there are sharp contrasts. You sidestepped the point by identifying a possibility that (were it to come to pass) would negate the scenario. My point stands, that there are choices that are clearly irrational. This includes basing any decision on astrology, fortune cookies, or California Psychics.
I addressed the induction problem in another post:
Quoting Relativist
In short: the answer to the problem of induction is: apply abduction.
Quoting Relativist
You are waving words around as if they were arguments. What is abduction, and how does it help? And the answer is quite vague. Abduction is little more than an attempt to formalise confirmation bias. It's presented as "given some evidence, infer the hypothesis that would best explain it" where "best" is left ill-defined. This leaves it entirely open to arbitrarily inferring any explanation to be the best.
Sure, confirmation bias is psychological and abduction is supposedly normative, but abduction lends itself to systematising whatever explanation matches our prior leanings. Philosophers reach for parsimony, coherence, and predictive success to justify abduction, but again these are often left ill-defined, and abduction a mere expression of preference rather than a piece of reasoning. Abduction is not an answer to Hume. Indeed, at its heart, it remains unclear what abduction amounts to; and as such, it is ineligible as a grounding for rational discourse.
That seems a rather strange, if not perverse, response from someone who thinks we should be guided by the science as to what to do about human-induced global warming.
Do you reject everything science teaches? Scientific theory is developed through abduction, and it has proved successful.
Do you consider conspiracy theories credible? If not, why not?
Not at all. Abduction is the use of the creative imagination in formulating testable hypotheses that might best explain the observed facts. An abductive hypothesis is always provisionalopen to rigorous testing, and thus quite the opposite of confirmation bias.
Quoting Relativist
Of course not. A rejection of one way that philosophers have claimed science works is not a rejection of science. That scientific theory is developed through abduction is a theory about scientific method. Pointing out the problems with that theory is not pointing out problems with what scientists do, but with what philosophers claim that scientists do.
Quoting Janus
There's that word "best" again. It hides that the criteria being used are things such as parsimony, coherence, and predictive success, normative concerns. Why not drop the pretence of "abduction" as a seperate rational process and look instead at the basis that scientists use for choosing between rival theories.
Quoting Janus
Notice that testing is a seperate process to abduction - one adduces the "best" explanation and then tests it. Abduction is not necessary for testing an hypothesis.
I don't think you understand what 'abduction' means in the context of science. It is the use of the imagination to come up with what seems to be the most fitting explanatory hypotheses. Of course testing is a separate issue. I only used the word 'best' to underline the fact that in hypothesizing the desirable aim is always to come up with what, consistent with whatever criteria, seems to be the best explanation possible given whatever limits of information and imagination are in play.
Testing is an entirely separate issueit comes after the hypothesizing. To put it concisely 'abduction" simply refers to the process of forming hypotheses.
Quoting Banno
As I say above I haven't said or implied that testing is a part of the abductive process. Of course abduction is not necessary for testing an hypothesisit is necessary for coming up with an hypothesis to be tested.
Yep. Just so. Do you?
Quoting Janus
Ok, that's it's proposed use - how does it manage to do this? Quoting Janus
But there is no method for doing this - only what someone claims to be the "best" hypothesis.
Quoting Janus
Well, if that is all it is, then it doesn't tell us which to choose among the many - which is "best"...
So we have deduction, and formal definitions of validity. We have induction, which consists in the claim that if all previous A's were B's, then we might well infer that all subsequent A's will be B's. As Hume pointed out it's formally invalid, but we do it anyway. Then we have a something labeled "abduction", that allows us to infer the best hypothesis, without telling us what "best" is. It's another name for selecting the hypothesis one prefers, without giving any reason.
There's more. Any explanation can be claimed to be the best, since no criteria are set out in the notion of abduction. But for any body of evidence, there are indefinitely many hypotheses that could explain it. Every test of a hypothesis involves multiple auxiliary assumptions. Any failure could be blamed on the main hypothesis or the auxiliary assumptions. Apply Duhem and Quine and the notion falls apart.
There is no certain way to ascertain which is "best". That's why I said "seems best'. The only way to ascertain whether a hypothesis is a good one is to test it, which means seeing whether the predictions that are entailed by the hypothesis are observed.
You mentioned parsimony, coherence, and predictive successthe first two would presumably be in mind when forming rigorous hypotheses. Coherence would be relative to consistency with existing accepted scientific understanding.
In any case, to refer to my original responseI was disagreeing with the assertion that abduction has anything to to with confirmation bias, and I say this is not so because hypotheses are to be tested, not accepted on account of their "feeling right" or whatever.
That said, feeling right might come into play in choosing between rival hypotheses, but acceptance of one over the other would be contingent on entailed predictions being observed, as well as coherence with current accepted scientific belief and understanding.
Indeed, and my reply was to reaffirm that the testing of an hypothesis is not part of performing an abduction. Abducting is choosing the "best" hypothesis, on the basis of one's preferences - the very meaning of confirmation bias - the tendency to interpret a situation so as to confirm one's preexisting attitudes.
Its not the explanation thats the best, its the hypothesis thats a good one and worth testing. A strawman from the king of strawmen. You are waving words around as if they were arguments.
Quoting Banno
Abduction is brainstorming.
Is it rational? Yes, of course. Its a method that works to generate new ideas that can be evaluated and justified. It can be very effective, as I know from my own career. It would be irrational not to use it under the appropriate circumstances.
Here's a thing - what does "abduction" mean? Even the SEP article can't say. So now you claim it's just making up an hypothesis. So why not just call it "hypothesising"? Why the new name?
Becasue Peirce liked triads, and wanted to add something to deduction and induction to make it a trinity. A very poor bit of abduction...
If you, any of you, think you have a clear notion of what abduction is, and why it is useful, set it out! There's be a Doctorate in it for you.
OK, then you know what abduction is, and claim that science doesn't actually use abduction. Tell me what science actually does that lends it credibility, that is lacking with abduction.
You didn't answer my question about conspiracy theories- are they credible? If not, why not?
I don't think anyone here can. I think folk have been told that what they are doing is abduction, but not looked to see what that meant; and when they do look, they will see the idea is hollow.
Show how I am mistaken.
My preferred approaches to philosophy of science find the concept of abduction problematic for a number of reasons. First, abduction is too rationalistic; real science is more anarchic. Second, abduction misses the paradigm-dependence of hypothesis generation. And third, abduction isnt a universal logic but a practice-specific activity embedded in forms of life. Maybe this is at least somewhat consistent with your objections.
Ive already answered that question. I recognize you dont like my answer.
Abduction entails drawing a non-necessary inference from a set of data (intended to be all available, relevant data), that consists of an explanatory hypothesis for that data - one that is deemed to explain the data better* than alternatives.
The inference is defeasible- it can be falsified by new, relevant data (previously overlooked or newly discovered) that is inconsistent with the hypothesis. Alternatively, it can be supplanted by a new hypothesis that demonstrably provides a superior* explanation.
This is consistent with the de facto means by which science advances through theory development, verification, revision, and replacement.
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*I'm deferring discussion of what makes an explanation better/superior.
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I could go into more details, but this suffices as a general description. Describe what what you disagree with, and provide what you consider a correct description.
Quoting Banno
I don't think it's fair to say that the hypotheses that are chosen are merely a matter of one's preferencesto repeat, they should be consistent with current scientific theory and understanding. If you want to call that confirmation bias, then you'd better apply that judgement to the whole of science.
Confirmation bias consists in ignoring evidence that tells against one's preferred beliefs, and scientific practice should be the opposite of thatit should involve actively trying to falsify current accepted belief and theory and attempting to find better, more comprehensive hypotheses.
I had a quick look at the SEP article, and I didn't find it helpfulfirstly because I don't think there is a significant difference between the two kinds of abduction it [purports to identify, and secondly because it seems to conflate the process of imagining hypotheses with a purported tendency to believe in them.
As I understand it, abduction is simply the creative imagining of hypothesesand the next step would be to test them rigorouslyif someone doesn't want to do that, but wants to cling to their "per hypothesis" that has nothing to do with abduction per se. So, abduction is not confirmation bias in any necessary sense, although of course abductive reasoning might be used to confirm biases.
Quoting Banno
It doesn't need to be validated. What would you replace it with?
Quoting Janus
Hume's attack is not on science here, and it is not on morality when he points out that you can't derive an ought from an is. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the two arguments are very similar, and what he is attacking in each case is a form of argument. Let me put it this way, he is not attacking rationality, he is attacking rationalism. He is attacking dogmatism. And when you are unable to defeat his logic, and also unable to accept his arguments, it is dogmatism that you are showing.
Yes, I believe in science, and I hope it will continue to provide a guide to the future and tools for the present for whatever future we may have. But I do not pretend that belief and hope are "rational" while unable to provide any coherent rationale. I also believe in trying to be truthful in communication, and kind to other people, and I wish you would too, but I do not pretend that it is rational, because it isn't.
Rationality cannot tell us how to live, or even what to think; to answer these sorts of question requires something else. it requires caring about something.
Cool. Nice and clean. Good stuff.
A few issues.
"Better" - an improvement on "best", but suffering the same ambiguity. If abduction is going to tell us which of the innumerable possible explanatory hypotheses to choose, then we need more than an asterisk and a deference. We need the basis for that choice. Otherwise abduction falls to underdetermination, to the DuhemQuine problem.
Whence normatively? Deductions are preferred when valid. Inductions are preferred on the basis of Bayesian statistics. What of abduction? If it is statistical success, then isn't it just anther name for induction? If it's some pragmatic or parsimonious, isn't that just an appeal to aesthetics? to what you prefer?
So it comes down to how you cash out better/superior.
And hence my original point, that whatever criteria you choose, you are subsequently just reinforcing that choice.
Well, yes - Quoting Joshs
Conformation of the current scientific theory. Feyerabend would have a party here.
If a conclusion were "determined" (not underdetermined) it would be a deduction- a conclusion that follows necessarily.
Of course, as you said, deduction would be preferred, but in real life (including science) we rarely have sufficient information to make a deduction. But there is often sufficient information to support some hypotheses more than others.
Quoting Banno
Methodology is indeed key. Some basics: explanatory scope and power, parsimony, more plausible than alternatives (consistent with more facts that are commonly accepted), fewer ad hoc assumptions (ad hoc suppositions are assumptions that are not entailed by the data and other commonly accepted facts). Biases entail ad hoc assumptions. It also entails consideration of other hypotheses.
Ideally, an abductive conclusion ought to be only as specific as the information warrants, otherwise it will include ad hoc assumptions.
Finally, the level of certainty ought to tied to the strength of the case. For example, consider a jury verdict based on a preponderance of evidence vs one based on "beyond reasonable doubt". A chosen "best" explanation may still be (arguably) unlikely. There's always the risk of choosing "the best of a bad lot"- which would tend to be the case when the data is sparse.
It's useful to solicit and receive feedback from others with divergent views. This can help identify overlooked, relevant facts, challenge assumptions that are ad hoc or reflect bias, and identify alternative hypotheses for comparing.
Your claim that abductive reasoning entails "reinforcing that choice" is false. That would be a corruption of abduction, such as occurs with conspiracy theories. The criteria I listed are sufficient to reject conspiracy theories. They depend on biased (ad hoc) assumptions, cherry-pick facts, instead of considering all relevant facts, reject or rationalize facts that are inconsistent with the theory, and a person's conviction toward a theory tends to gain strength by seeking endorsement others with similar biases, while alternative hypotheses are rejected on the basis of bias and/or an unjustified faith in the conspiracy theory.
To be consistent, apply this more broadly. It's reasonable and rational to draw conclusions based on incomplete information. That's what abductive reasoning is all about. I discussed this in my last 2 replies to Banno (1. Here and 2.here).
No it doesn't. Scientists are not all equally scrupulous, and are subject to peer pressure, the persuasion of big pharma et cetera, and the need to get funding. Some science is biased and some is slapdash, and some is bullshit. It's not supposed to be religion where you just believe what the high priests say.
Then explain by what you meant by "I believe in science."
Quoting unenlightened
False equivalence. Science is not equivalent to what individual scientists say. I'm referring to commonly accepted theory. How we deal with the potential for bias by scientists is another matter.
What I believe is that science is a sceptical endeavour, that progresses by means of demonstration. which is to say, that I expect scientists not to put their trust too lightly in the work of others, but require experiments to be repeated, and findings to be demonstrated, and theories to be treated as provisional whenever their scope is extended.
Quoting Relativist
And individual scientists do not talk about commonly accepted theory? Really, what do you imagine needs your stalwart defence here? Are you having a battle to see who understands science better? Enough already!
Irrelevant to the point I made: you accept some things as true, despite the possibility it is false.
[Quote]Really, what do you imagine needs your stalwart defence here? Are you having a battle to see who understands science better? Enough already![/quote]
Not all all. Up to now, you seem to have been arguing that if a statement is POSSIBLY false, then it cannot be assumed true. That is what I was challenging.
:up:
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As to Peirces devised notion of abduction, Ill butt in for a sec.:
Abduction is as worthless as pure guesswork when divorced from that ideal, else standard, by which that abducted is measured. That standard being simply the maximal explanatory power of the given abduction to account for those givens it seeks to explainthis especially in comparison to all other alternative explanations.
As a relatively well-known example in science, Einsteins imaginings of traveling at the speed of light revealed to Einstein that something was amiss with Maxwells equations, so Einstein abducted a new explanation for how things worked, for which he then devised a new form of mathematics to properly express. None of this would have been of any scientific significance without the given abduction holding maximal explanatory power for the relevant known data. And field tests were done which empirically validated that light does indeed bend due to gravity. Yet the Theory of Relativity is as of today in partial conflict with the relevant paradigm of quantum mechanics: they each describe the physical universe using fundamentally incompatible frameworks. We hold onto both because each holds a tremendous, maximal, explanatory power for the data obtained within each branch but, because they are fundamentally incompatible, we already know that either one of the two or both are in some way(s) mistaken. The Theory of Relatively is, again, resultant of an abduction that currently has maximal explanatory power within its field of study. This is not to then say that new abductions could not eventually surface which will hold yet greater explanatory power than does the ToR. (the accumulated data, always empirical, remains unaltered, but the explanations for it can on occasion come in the form of paradigm shifts).
Same ideal standard of maximal explanatory power can, for another example, be applied to abductions regarding metaphysics, and not just the physical world which the empirical sciences study.
In overview: the explanatory power of ideas and theories is often enough an overlooked essential measure of an ideas/theorys worth. Same can be said for the Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection. Nothing comes close by comparison in terms of explanatory power as regards the diversity of lifeforms given all the data we know of. (I know, I know, it has that one contender of The omni-creator deity did it but, to be forthright, to many if not most this explanation for everything that exists does not come close to providing any understanding for what exists. So its explanatory power is very weak, if at all there. This even when granting the hypothetical of such a being.)
Abduction is no more rational than any imagining is. And I cant fathom how Humes arguments again rationalism wherein sound deductions rule the land would in any manner be changed by it. Its the explanatory power of that which has been abducted which reason states gives the abduction credibility in likely (but not necessarily) being true. This as is the case with ToR.
Should. But should it?
We have before us quite different notions of abduction. Sometimes it is talked of as the process of forming an hypothesis. We know that, for any set of observations, there are innumerable possible explanations. Simply having available a range of hypotheses is insufficient. We must choose between them.
In the supplement, Peirce's version of abduction is taken from this quote:
Quoting SEP article
In reality, we do not have just A - we have alternate hypotheses, each of which explains C. And we have the possibility that C is incorrect. C is also theory laden - observations dependent on our prior presumptions as to what it is we are observing.
We are never in a position to say that this hypothesis is categorically better than that one.
So the SEP account brings in ABD1:
Quoting SEP article
And to the problem of which hypothesis is best. Abduction does not tell us. It instead brings in the auxiliaries of simplicity and coherence, aesthetic preferences that remain unclarified within the context of abduction. So again, abduction amounts to choosing the hypothesis that looks good to you.
Feyerabend examines examples in detail, such as the tower argument, early telescopic observations, or Brownian motion, to show that science often progresses by insisting on an explanation that is not the simplest or most complete. An example - Copernicus's heliocentric model was both less accurate and more complex than the Ptolemaic alternative. The Copernican case showed that the heliocentric theory was adopted despite not being more accurate, and actually being more complex, contradicting the idea that science always progresses by choosing simpler, more predictive theories.
One example amongst many.
Now Feyerabend used such examples to show that science does not conform to the model proposed by Popper - that falsification, while useful, is very far from the full story. The case is even worse with Abduction, which remains ill-defined and obscure.
Science in real life is much, much messier than the descriptions given by Popper or Peirce. And you are right that the SEP article does not set out the notion of abduction well - but we need add that, that is a problem for abduction, it remains ill defined. The term papers over the issues of method, rather than explicating them.
My own view is of science as a social phenomenon rather than a logical one. There is no firm method that underpins the practice of science, but rather a set of attitudes that involve openness to criticism, open discussion, join examination of evidence, collaboration - the basic liberal attitudes of which we are so in need.
This is perhaps the point of intersection between myself and .
Quite right. We need pay close attention to that last bit. We may indeed support one hypotheses over another, but the "why" cannot be based solely on information - there must also be a preference. A mere list of facts is insufficient to decide between competing hypotheses.
That's again the problem with abduction - it doesn't set out why we should prefer one hypotheses amongst the many.
See the examples from Feyerabend given in my reply to @Janus, just above. An examination of the history of science shows that it does not follow the supposed prescription you provide; and indeed, that scientific progress is dependent on breaking those conventions.
The point I would press here is again that what makes science work is not a series of logical rules, but a group of sociological rules. It's not a special type of logic - induction or abduction - that makes science effective, but the open interplay between scientists.
I gave the example of the comparison between the Copernican and Ptolemaic systems, above. The first renderings of the Copernican system were at best no simpler or more accurate than those of the then quite well developed Ptolemaic account.
Brownian motion was noticed in pollen grains in 1827. For decades, it was accounted for as at first evidence of a vital force in the pollen, then when it was demonstrated in non-organic particles, as evidence of eddies in the fluid. It wasn't until Einstein provided a statistical analysis of Brownian Motion as the result of collisions with other particles that it was linked to molecular theory - the maths made Brownian motion a testable, quantitative prediction of molecular theory. Feyerabend pointed out that the acceptance of this explanation is thus theory-laden, dependent on the availability of a mathematical interpretation in order to allow empirical confirmation.
Bringing this back to your post, what this shows is that what counts as providing the greater explanatory power is dependent on the ad hoc and auxiliary hypotheses employed. There is no simple way to compare competing hypotheses, since each hypothesis brings with it a differing account of what observation is relevant.
Abduction here leads away from the better answer!
Considering relativity again, the procession of Mercury was explained by an otherwise unseen additional planet - which was even named "Vulcan". It had to exist, becasue it was the best explanation for the observed phenomena - exactly in line with Abduction:
But this abduction was mistaken!
What these examples show is not just that abduction is sometimes mistaken, but that it leads to a lack of progress, and that other, wildly differing background assumptions are instead needed to progress our understanding.
Notice that in each case, abduction leads to the confirmation of the accepted paradigm, where what was needed was a change to that very paradigm. Abduction as a counterproductive process.
A nod to @Joshs.
Allow me to disagree somewhat. Sociologism in scientific theory starts from the abstraction of theories from their logical, technological, historical, phenomenological, and referential contexts. In general, competing theories have something in common in any of these dimensions of science. Often, competing theories share the same problem (historical, physical referential, etc.) to be solved, as is the case with string theory and quantum gravity, which seek to unify forces. Both theories have the forces of nature as common references. These theories were not created for sociological reasons but because of a restriction that phenomena and physical referential problems impose on the formulation of theories. For me, it is only after this abstraction of theory applied to theory that we can consider the subjectivity (or intersubjectivity) of the scientist as the cause of the formulation of theories. But that ignores a whole series of dimensions that surround and impose restrictions on the creation of theories beyond their sociological field.
What bollocks. Abduction starts the game of pragmatic reasoning as you have to have a belief to doubt. All abduction is saying is that we can pick up this game from some generally sensible point. We don't start naked but already can call on some kind of useful paradigm.
Abduction is followed by the deduction of general consequences and the inductive confirmation that comes as the observational evidence piles up. Or doesn't. If we find the original paradigm wanting, we become receptive to the alternatives. Some new better basis of abduction is sought.
Quoting Banno
Why did you omit mention of deduction I wonder? And if everything is sociology, then how is any type of logic special?
What makes Peircean pragmatism special is that it identifies an epistemic method with a structure that combines logic into a generalised process of inquiry. It is logic put to proper work and not some noodling branch of maths. Set theory for beginners.
Then the obvious...
Quoting JuanZu
The sociology is constrained by the reality. And that is pretty much the whole bleeding point of having an epistemic method. To dig ourselves out of the hole of subjectivity in some fashion where we don't also lose sight of our socially-constructed self-hood.
Pragmatism just sets up the usual thing of being a semiotic organism at a more abstracted level. We learn to speak in terms of equations and observables.
We see how folk operate at their everyday level of sociological belief construction and feel, well, things could be more rigorously done than that. And after the wheels of the scientific approach get moving, the sociology finds itself having to react to the rapid advances in pragmatic knowledge that follows.
Mostly trying to put the problem child in its place. Telling it that is nothing so special after all. Because beauty, truth, god, mind, values, faith, perfection. Or postmodernism, relativism, diversity and other forms of sociological blah, blah, blah.
However, if we focus on the process of new theory becoming generally accepted as true, abduction does apply. Theories DO get falsified, revised, and replaced - consistent with abduction.
So if we're focussing on advancing knowledge, creativity is critical. But more often, in everyday life, we are making epistemic judgements on incomplete data - and there ARE objective means of evaluating the possible explanations - as I discussed in my last post. If you deny the efficacy of abduction, then you have no basis to reject conspiracy theories.
Nah, Im not claiming that. To clarify my position:
What is central to the scientific method of the empirical sciences (in contrast to what some term the science of mathematics and such, which have no such method) is communal verification via empirical means (aka, peer review and replicability of test results) that falsifiable hypotheses are not in fact false and, thereby, are likely to be true. No honest to goodness scientist ever claims in the conclusion of a scientific article that, because the falsifiable hypothesis empirically tested for is statistically evidenced to have a probability of error equal to or lesser than 0.000 (thats that max that, at least in my days, gets to be reported), the given hypothesis has been proven true. Likely to be true, sure, but this then goes without saying.
All Im claiming is that abduction plays its relatively minor part in the overall picture of the empirical sciencesa minor role that nevertheless sometimes is crucial enough. All falsifiable hypotheses (regarding what in fact is the case) are products of induction and/or abductionimagination, creativity, and intuition are paramount to the process of arriving at good falsifiable hypotheses. And when it comes to paradigm shifts, such as was the case with both the Theory or Relativity and the Theory of Evolution when first presented, there too some abduction typically applies, this in addition to all inductions. Still, were these major theories not falsifiable via the scientific method and thereby empirically verifiable, they then wouldnt be empirically scientific. M-theory, and string theory in general, is quite interesting for a great number of reasons. But until it becomes falsifiable empirically, as many others have stated, it just isnt empirical science. Same can be said for Multiple World Interpretations. Lamarckian evolution which likewise emerged via abduction, at the very least in its crude original format (e.g., giraffes have longer necks because they continually strive to eat the leaves of taller trees and thereby pass down this striving in the physically manifested longer necks of offspring) on the other hand, was and remains a falsifiable scientific theory one which has been falsified, and is thereby known to be false.
Abduction is basically trial-and-error heuristics produced via intuition (to which the non-conscious aspects of mind play a large role) that seeks to best explain some set of givens. Again, on its own its as good as imaginative guessworkwhich isnt saying a lot for it as a means of reasoning. Its the explanatory power of certain abductions that give these certain abductions any merit in the empirical sciences. This, again, from testable hypotheses to relatively grand theories regarding how things work. And explanations, to hold any power (i.e., ability to accomplish, here, to accomplish adequate understanding of the relevant subject matter), will best account in valid manners for both what is and what is not there empirically. Hence no contradiction within the theory, yes, but more importantly nor between the theory and the best empirical evidence gained to date. For one example, once we obtained sufficiently strong telescopes and saw no Vulcan, the explanatory power of the Vulcan theory could have only crumbled, at least to all those who where honest with themselves. Your other two examples of Brownian motion and of previous accounts of astronomy likewise dont take into account a) all the data known at the respective times and b) all the data which has been since then accumulated.
Going back to the ToR and QM, it is fact thatwhile both account for a lot and thereby produce great resultsthe two utilize fundamentally incompatible frameworks. There is thereby a fundamental contradiction between the two. Given all the data we currently have, do we then have any means of appraising which of the two is mistaken (here assuming that theyre not both in some fundamental way mistaken)? Same then with competing paradigms of the past when appraised from the perspectives of the past. Given a greater collection of data regarding the physical universe, say at the end of the next millennium, does it not stand to reason that at this future point in time we might then hold a theory of physicality that grants far greater understandings in noncontradictory mannerssuch that we at that point will look back to now as a time period with mistaken theories?
Quoting Banno
As with all trial-and-error heuristics, most abductions are bound to be wrong. Yes, of course. Notwithstanding, for any paradigm shift to ever occur one must first conceive of a new paradigm from outside the boundaries of the old that better accounts for the known data. This will not be a process of deduction, nor will it typically be one of induction (generalization from particulars, for example), but instead will typically commence with what we in retrospect will then likely claim to be a flash of insight, as per the Eureka moment; this then yet being abduction. One which happens to eventually produce a better understanding regarding what is by newly devised deductions and inductions, which yet pivot on the given roundabout abduction. But again, without being falsifiable, it will not be science (not of the empirical kind).
There are not innumerable possible plausible explanations. It is not abduction that might inform as to which explanation is most plausible but induction, which really just consists in the (vast) network of empirical knowledge we already have in place.
Abduction is simply the business of imagining explanations in ways informed by current scientific understanding.
Please, disagree.
Science is a human enterprise, and as such is communal. A picture of how science works must include the social aspects, looking at the communication between scientists. Competing theories may have a shared reference, although since before Feyerabend and Kuhn it has been understood that those references are themselves embedded in theory. The sociology of science is not the whole story, but it is a part of the story.
Go back to your OP
Quoting JuanZu
More recent developments in Philosophy show us how experience and custom are themselves grounded in the community in which we live. To doubt requires a background of presumed certainty. Those fundamental beliefs are what enable doubt.
Again, science is not just a social enterprise, but it is in part a social enterprise.
What we can take from Hume is that induction has not been validated. Our beliefs in what are loosely called the external world or the existence of the self are not deduced from first principles, nor inducted from some finite set of observations, but presumed as the background against which our enterprises - including science - can occur.
Abduction is worse. The SEP notes that Peirces conception of abduction shifts over his long career, making it hard to pin down a coherent, stable doctrine. Peirce apparently thought abduction was about inventing hypotheses, not justifying them; and so is nothing more than conjecturing. The schematic form he offers, mentioned previously, amounts to adopting an idea one already has - hence my somewhat hyperbolic accusation of confirmation bias. What is certain is that abduction is no improvement on induction, and certainly cannot overcome Hume's objections.
His work is a bit broader than just that. His classic formulation, "anything goes", is of course mistaken; but the interesting bit is how it is mistaken - what it is that restricts which ideas are considered scientific and which are not.
Of course scientists are creative. Calling there creativity "abduction" and locking it down to Peirce's simplistic schema is denigrating that creativity. Positing abduction as a response to Hume's scepticism is piling obfuscation on top of misunderstanding.
The activities in which scientists engage are not algorithmic, not mechanical. Those accounts of scientific method that set it out as such do science a disservice.
This is a simple logical truth - a hypotheses being unfalsified does not make it more likely to be true. On this we agree. We could take a Bayesian approach to selecting amongst competing hypotheses, but note well that this is not adopting induction. There is a world of difference between an hypothesis being unfalsified and it's being more likely than other hypotheses. Poppers point was exactly that: science isnt about confirming hypotheses through accumulation of positive cases (which falls afoul of Humes problem of induction), but about weeding them out through falsification. A hypothesis standing unrefuted is not more true, its just not yet eliminated.
A very large part of The Logic of Scientific Discovery is a frequentist defence of falsification. The probability of a universal law (e.g., "all swans are white") is always zero in the strict mathematical sense, because it makes infinitely many claims about unobserved cases. The case he made was the defence of a statistical definition of the corroboration of an hypothesis that survives a sever attemtp at falsification. But this could not be made to fly.
The problems were many, but the DuhemQuine problem is central. An hypotheses is never tested in isolation, but in unison with a vast array of other hypotheses, each of which might account for any falsification. Lakatos research programmes, Kuhns paradigms, and Bayesian epistemology all tried to capture what Poppers model missed.
Quoting javra
Nice. But is it right, or even fair, to lump all this together and call it "abduction", and then to set it out in some gross oversimplification such as
Quoting SEP article
As I said to @Relativist, that is surely a derogation of science.
And then that further point, to relate this back to 's OP: abduction, in any of it's many guises, does not solve Hume's problem of induction.
This. If anything, abduction is a description of the problem.
Like wow. Who woulda thunk? Speaking here for the anthropological and psychological science that provided the evidence that might have disturbed the dogmatic slumbers of philosophy.
Quoting Banno
Yep. Peirce's account of abduction goes right off the rails where he turns spiritualist on the issue. His il lume naturale, or the natural human instinct for making correct guesses. It is like his writings on agapism, or the cosmological principle of creative growth through love.
So Peirce as a philosopher and scientist can be pinged on exactly these grounds of being embedded in some rather over-powering sociological context. The social pressure to conform his views to the religiosity and transcendentalism of his place and time was immense. It cost him his career at Harvard. It paid him to lean into it when he was dirt poor and living off Christian charity in rural obscurity.
Peirce is a good example of how the most penetrating mind is also caught in the web of whatever is its very particular social context. And his account of abduction breaks down exactly because he is being forced towards explanations that are plainly not natural to the way he started out in his argument.
Quoting Banno
So you can't have it both ways. You can't claim that sociology is both important and then not important in how the method of pragmatic reason was formulated.
Again, perhaps you don't even understand Peirce's tripartite cycle of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation. Or maybe for sociological reasons you give your distorted reading that favours the metaphysical prejudices of some other time and place.
But whatever. Scholars of pragmatism have no problem separating the logic of abduction, deduction and inductive confirmation from the sudden lurch towards religiosity once Peirce reached the issue of how humans in practice get good at striking upon clever hypotheses.
If that fact needs its own explanation, then others here are already stating the obvious that some pragmatic paradigm always exists as a launch point. And the departure can be either an extension or a rejection of that paradigm would say. It is another sociological fact of science that often its most creative minds have crossed over from some other discipline and so have the advantage of some other paradigm.
We don't have to believe that abduction is about divine inspiration. A proper sociological understanding of science or maths, or philosophy can show how novelty is generated by quite everyday habits of thought. Even art school sets out to train its students to hone their vision by the application of a pragmatic process of invention.
So yes, everything humans do has a socially constructed context. But who would you turn to get real answers about the reality of that in the end? Probably not a logician or philosopher. At least not unless they had studied the available social and psychological science.
:up:
Given posts such as these, seems that the only difference between us in all thats been so far said concerns whether or not the word and corresponding conceptualization of abduction ought to be employed.
To put it in ways I think you might understand, Im here simply utilizing the language of a given language game with that community which utilizes the language game.
In favor of its use, we do in part sometime reason about what is via use of creative heuristical concepts which, once spurredin what I find to be great analogy to natural selectionthen get culled such that only those most fitting to there given context of subject matter get to survive and thereby procreate within the (here implicitly addressed, scientific) culture of commonly accepted ideas of what is possibility the case.
In opposition to its use, it can (as can be found in this thread) be easily enough misconstrued as being something other than imaginative guesswork (namely, to account for some as of yet unaccounted for given), this since its proclaimed to be a form of reasoning.
I can see it both ways, so Im impartial as to whether or not the term should be used. (Ill likely use it among those that do and vice versa.)
As to likelihood, I find that this converges with epistemological issues of justifications for sustained beliefs regarding what is true. Although I differ in some ways from it (with these differences being relatively trivial), I so far find Susan Haacks foundherentism to be adequate for the task. In a very imperfect summation of what I have in mind: the justification hybrid of foundationalism and coherentism works by means of noncontradictory, hence consistent, coherency between communally verified empirical data (all of which stems from knowledge by acquaintance which is, again, communally verified, and verifiable by all in principle) and the unfalsified theses (from grand theories to individual hypothesizes that are conceptually embedded with the former, all, again, falsifiable) regarding this data. When the theoretical / conceptual sum of falsifiable ideas cohere in consistent manners, this then increases the likelihood of the given sum being correct about what in fact is, hence true. Conversely, whenever there are found inconsistencies, then something somewhere is known to be amiss. This then is resolved by further communal experimentations and, on occasion, new theses / paradigms that better account for the accumulated data in consistent manners. At any rate, point being, a sum of experience-grounded justifiable beliefs regarding what is true (which within science must all be falsifiable) which, as given cohort, hold no contradictions within nor any contradictions with other cohorts of such beliefs gives no indication of being false, i.e. wrong, i.e. untrue. The greater such cohort of beliefs, the greater the strength of the cohort, and so the greater the likelihood of it being true. Hence, this ideal then exhibits the greater likelihood of both the cohort at large and all its individual parts being true. But, I will add, never infallibly so. A great case in point to this effect is the Theory of Evolution via natural selection; details still need to be ironed out, of course, and certain minor suppositions might eventually be evidenced wrong, but, overall, it is exceedingly likely to be true; and this due to the aforementioned justification.
This being a different topic but I thought it might be worth mentioning.
Here's, I think, the first use of "abduction" in this thread:
Quoting Relativist
Leaving aside why there must be such an explanation, a careful look will show that "abduction" doesn't provide such an explanation. "Inference to best explanation" is utterly hollow, until one sets out what a best explanation is. Further, is the mooted "natural law" an explanation of what happens, or just a description - "for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction" sets out what happens; does it explain what happens?
It's apparent that many here think "abduction" provides an explanation, tricking themselves into not taking Hume seriously. Science does not gain its force from deduction, induction, or abduction.
Laws are descriptions, not explanations. What matters is the communal practice of testing, contesting, revising. Abduction just papers over the real philosophical problem (Humes), instead of answering it.
So there's good reason to question the use of abduction hereabouts.
cool.
Quoting Banno
Yup, I'm aware of it. (see my last comment)
Quoting Banno
They can become so when entertaining Aristotelian notions: natural laws then here become formal causes (i.e., determinants) that effect (formationally determine) all that physically is, thereby serving as one explanation (which converges with other types of causes and, thereby, explanations) for what is. Nowadays, gravity is taken to be a universally applicable principle of the cosmos, so I find no reason not to deem it a natural law. We then use the notion of gravity to explain why an object thrown up into thin air will always come back down to earth (and, of course, a whole lot more: why do we have air to breath on this planet? One reason/cause/determinant for a breathable atmosphere is gravity.). And formational determinancy can conform to counterfactual theories of causality: e.g., without gravity, there would be no atmosphere; therefore, gravity is a partial cause/reason for the atmosphere on Earth.
Still, science addresses a heck of a lot more than natural laws. Cognitive science, neuroscience, biology, ethology (my strong points when it comes to science) for example all address aspects of what is via the scientific method which, though of course partly determined by natural laws, have practically nothing to do with them (at least not in terms of their study).
Quoting Banno
Hey, at the very least in this, we see eye to eye.
You haven't provided one. You've argued that science does not progress through abduction, which is a fair point, but that doesn't imply abduction is not truth directed.
Quoting Banno
Abduction doesn't provide explanations, it COMPARES explanations. I've brought up conspiracy theories, and argued that it is irrational to embrace them - based on abdduction.
Quoting javra
...happens a lot more then it perhaps ought, around these fora. A favourite grump of mine.
But if I may advocate for the devil, let's look at gravity. It's the force of attraction between two masses, and explains all sorts of things, from balls falling to the motion of satellites... or does it describe that motion - that the motion depends on the combined mass and the square of the distance between the bodies... is that an explanation of what happens, or a description?
But gravity is the curvature of space-time! There's an explanation. Only that curvature is itself a mathematical description, one that as you note is incompatible with the other half of physics, which describes things in very different terms.
So we get to this:Quoting javra
Does it explain why? Or does it just detail the description of the motion?
Now my point would be that it doesn't matter. What we get is a brilliant and useful way of working out what will happen - description or explanation, be damned.
A very odd take. Laws appeal to symmetries. So they are grounded in mathematical logic.
The third law seems a good example where no one would much think it describes the world as ordinarily experienced. But once we grasp the principles of Galilean relativity, then we could frame things in this way.
So sure, we might only observe correlations and not causes. But then the maths of symmetry have an unarguable logic. We cant just make that shit up for sociological reasons. We have deep metaphysical principles that explain how the world is exactly the way it is.
Following the symmetries is how metaphysics and then natural science got so good at causal accounts of the world. So good that dramatic failures of correlation became required for folk to re-examine their mathematical arguments.
There were pretty good reasons to expect supersymmetry to show up once our particle colliders got into Higgs energy territory. But that now looks a busted dream.
This doesnt mean we then should junk symmetry as the foundation of causal explanations. But it does suggest that some wrong assumptions got built in somewhere along the line. We need to find some further subtlety of the maths that weve been missing. This is what particle physics in particular has been doing the past 100 years.
Correlations might tell you about observable events. But symmetries tell you about the logical structure of Being. The necessary causes of there being events to be observed, even when those events are essentially probabilistic and so more on the inductive side of the fence.
Seems to me you missed the argument. Oh well.
Let's look at conspiracy theories. The classic analysis for my eye comes from Watkins, in his Confirmable and Influential Metaphysics. Watkins was a disciple and defender of of Popper.
In the paper, Watkins points out that some hypotheses are neither confirmable nor falsifiable. Such hypotheses have the logical form of an uncircumscribed existential statement - one in which nothing is said about where or when the item in question occurs. This is the logical structure of many conspiracy theories.
Let's look at an example. The government is hiding evidence of alien landings. This asserts the existence of some thing - alien landings - but nothing is said here about where or when. However the government responds, it is open to the believer to maintain their position. If they open area 51 to inspection, the theorist can say that the evidence has been moved elsewhere. If they deny that there is any evidence, that reinforces the idea of a conspiracy.
Where is abduction here?
Is it irrational to embrace conspiracy theories? Consider MKUltra, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study or Watergate. These were conspiracy theories until the time and place of the incidents were fixed.
It is not irrational to believe in conspiracies.
I gather that much. But there's something to not throwing out babies with their bathwater.
Quoting Banno
I can deal with that. Just wanted to mention that you're looking at explanations for gravity and at descriptions of what it physically is. I was myself only addressing gravity per se as explanation (hence, even if I might not hold a true belief regarding its global properties and nature given what I know about today's physics, I yet know that it is). For me, then, if a kid asks me why does a ball thrown up into the air always come down - or else an adult asks why a human can't walk on water - I will yet answer with "be-cause of gravity". :wink:
:wink:
And is that better than "Be-cause it is the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster"?
I think not. What makes gravity a better account is F=Gm?m?/r².
It's what we do that counts, the use to which we can put the theory, and F=Gm?m?/r² is much more useable than "Because it is the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster".
Science doesn't progress solely via abduction, but it certainly could not progress at all, or even get off the ground, without it.
Well, without getting into the nitty gritty, the notion of gravity coheres into all other notions we hold without contradiction: as to simplistic definitions, masses attract masses, larger ones more so than smaller ones. No maths needed for this falsifiable little understanding of what goes on cosmically.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster, on the other hand, is no match for the will of the invisible and inaudible house fairy residing underneath my carpet. That aside, only unicorns can find any of these falsifiable. And I ain't no unicorn. So ... gravity is thereby a far better explanation in the JTB realm of things for me to give.
Quoting Banno
I was joking, yes, but in all sobriety, how would a child or most average adults be benefited by being given this equation? Rather than being told a more simple account of what gravity is, such as the one aforementioned. I very much like the quote, "make things as simple as possible, but no simpler," and this is very much context relative.
Besides, the point remains, gravity can serve as an explanation.
Noethers theorem links symmetries to conservation laws - is that were you would go? Isn't describing things in terms of symmetry still describing them?
"For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction" is interpreted as "momentum is conserved" which in turn is understood as "the Universe is symmetrical in space, hence momentum is conserved".
Bigger and bigger descriptions. Still descriptions. Awesome descriptions.
I'll accept that, if you will accept that the explanation is no more than a more usable description. :wink:
Abduction? Nothing more nor less than creating explanatory hypotheses. I'm not seeing the difficulty you are apparently having with the idea.
If that's all it is, then fine. Add the word "best" - "creating the best explanatory hypotheses" - and it falls apart.
So where you say
Quoting Janus
"plausible" adds the normative element that lets confirmation bias in. We can now reject all the explanations we take as implausible.
But further, in the context of this thread, do you take abduction as helping answer Hume's scepticism?
Help me out with that.
I take explanations to answer question of "why" and descriptions to answer questions of "what". Each then pertains to two different contexts of inquiry. Describing what a rock is does not explain why the rock is. But, yes, to explain why a rock is does necessitate some form of description of what a rock is.
Maybe of interest, in Romanian the term for "why" is "de ce" which literally translates into "from/for what". This too can illustrate that explanations of why are of a completely different nature than descriptions of what.
Likewise, to provide an explanation for a given description can make sense. Conversely, to provide a description of a given explanation doesn't, at least not at face value (unless, for example, one seeks to represent a given explanation via different words than the given explanation itself).
How do you differ?
Well, why not aim for the best explanation one can think of? Do you deny there are better and worse explanations?
Abduction, at least in the context of science, relies on current accepted understanding, and the degree of consistency with that as a measure of plausibility.
Think about plate tectonics, for example. Someone could have come up with a rival hypothesis that it was the gravitational effects of the Sun and Moon causing the formation of mountains and the creation of separate continents. Or they could have speculated that it was the will of God. Would there be any plausibility in those ideas? Don't you think abductive conjectures need to be testable, falsifiable or at least supported by mathematics?
This was a side-kick at Aristotle's causes. Perhaps for Aristotle "fire is hot" is a description, but "fire is hot because heat is its essential nature" is an explanation. The explanation gives the cause. Elsewhere I've argued against causes, for various reasons.
Here, Aristotle hasn't noticed that "fire is hot because heat is its essential nature" says no more than that fire is hot because fire is hot.
So I'm raising the question - can we distinguish between a description and an explanation? My suspicion is that explanations are descriptions in a border context. Explanations might appear to invoking metaphysical causes, but I suspect this is an illusion.
Go right ahead. Just don't conclude that such an explanation is true, which is what is needed if we are to overcome Hume's objection.
As I understand it Hume's point was that inductive conclusions are not logically necessary, that is that induction is not deduction.
As you say "don't conclude that such an explanation is true". I agree with that...scientific theories in general and the abductive hypotheses that may lead to them cannot be demonstrated to be true. They are held as perennially provisional.
This is right, as I was trying to point out to @Relativist elsewhere.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
I'm not sure you have a very clear notion of 'explanation'.
This is certainly an explanation. It could mean, "Because of the law of gravity by which all such things fall," or, "Because the Earth is exerting a force on the object," or any other number of things, but each of them is explanatory.
Quoting Banno
This is to say that, "There is a force being exerted on the object, that force is captured by this equation, and that force will continue to operate into the future."
Quoting Banno
You have nothing at all if you don't have an explanation. One cannot describe the future without knowledge of how things will work in the future, and one cannot have such knowledge in the absence of explanations. Your "usefulness" is entirely dependent on this ability to predict the future, and your idea that this is done sans explanation is altogether incorrect.
If one describes what has happened in the past but posits no explanation or principle by which the past and the future are connected, then they will be wholly barred from "brilliant and useful ways of working out what will happen."
False equivalence.
A conspiracy is any covert plan involving two or people. One could have a theory that a conspiracy has occurred, but the term "conspiracy theory" has come to have a special meaning. It refers to irrationally jumping to the conclusion that there is some absurdly widespread conspiracy behind some perceived issue. Examples:
-9/11 Conspiracy theories
-Pizzagate
Faked moon landing
Big Pharma Conspiracies
UFO Conspiracy Theories
In all cases, they are based on biased speculation, cherry picking of facts, ignoring or rationalizing discofirming evidence - i.e. bad epistemology.
Quoting Leontiskos
I never said that abduction PROVIDES explanations. I said it entails process for SELECTING an explanation.
And I DID outline some criteria:
Quoting Relativist
Quoting Relativist
I also pointed out that the errors made by conspiracy theorists is that they are not properly applying such principles.
The criticisms directed at me all pertain to the advance of science- that it isn't made through abduction. This is irrelevant to my general points - that it is reasonable to apply IBE in our epistemic judgements, and that we all do this every day - most often, in a superficial way. When we challenge each others' opinions in this forum, we often dig deeper to justify our claims: we're defending our beliefs on the basis of the factors that lead to our (abductive) judgement.
Agreed.
Prompted by claims made in this thread, I have begun reading Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method". His focus is on the advance of science through creative processes that are at odds with abduction. For example, scientific breakthroughs often depend on thinking outside the box and dropping theory-laden assumptions. He makes good points about this, but he's not making arguments against the reasonableness of abduction as an epistemological methodology for comparing hypotheses.
I would say that "conspiracy theory" is a fairly empty term in this pejorative sense. If it refers to "irrational jumping to a conclusion," then of course conspiracy theories are irrational. This is just a tautology. Yet the substantive question is always whether some theory does or does not jump to a conclusion; or whether some argument is or is not irrational. Labels like "conspiracy theory" or "irrational" always commit the fallacy of begging the question whenever there is a substantive issue being debated. Better to skip them altogether and give an argument for why something is supposed to be irrational.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't think so. Any phenomenon admits to multiple explanations, the vast majority of which are profoundly unlikely. A conspiracy theory is a rococo sort of explanation, containing multiple agents and moving parts that must act in perfect concert for it to be true. Prima facie there is nothing that says a conspiracy theory must be false. However due to their complexity there are almost always multiple serious flaws in such theories.
For a conspiracy theory to be a conspiracy theory, there must be a conspiracy theorist who espouses it. The two come as a package. It is well noted that it's impossible to disabuse a conspiracy theorist of their theory. Because, It is always possible to paper over any flaw with more complexity. This is recursively endless. The same phenomenon is seen in science. No theory can be disproven outright. Rather, for the false theory to fit the data, more and more complexity has to be piled onto it, until it collapsed under its own weight, and the scientific community thoroughly dismisses it. But, there can always be cranks who will cling to it no matter what, and work diligently sustaining there theory by patching over the flaws with more and more complexity. Flat earth is a perfect example of this.
This is the irrationality of conspiracy theories. It is the selection of a theory not because it is best, but because it meets the needs of the conspiracist. To the conspiracy theorist, the fundamental axiom is that their theory is correct. Given this starting point, any apparent contradiction can be worked around, given enough time and cleverness. This process is obviously not rational, it does not favor outcomes where the result is true. Even if, every now and then, they might indeed be true.
The hypothesis of alien landings is not an inference to the best explanation of all available facts. It could be a reasonable initial reaction to some report, but further analysis ought to expose problems with the theory. Are alternative explanations sought? Has the feasibility of long-distance space travel been considered? Should technologically intelligent life be deemed sufficiently common in our sector of the galaxy to consider their presence plausible?
What about the conspiracy itself? How many individuals would have to be involved? Is it plausible that all of them would keep the secret?
Implausibilities and disconfirming facts are ignored and the merely possible is treated as plausible. The repeated rationalizations implies the conspiracy theorist is not reconsidering the hypothesis as more information comes to light.
There's invariably a demand that naysayers "prove them wrong"- which is an absurd standard - since they are also not provably right. It's possible that hundreds of people are behaving perfectly at keeping the secret, and taking the secret to their graves. It's possible Einstein is wrong about speed of light limitations on travel. But the many implausibilities should have bearing on ones's judgement.
Almost nothing in life is provably true, but we can still weigh facts and evidence - and strive to do this as reasonably as possible- that is all abduction is. It is about justifying ones beliefs. Believing one proposition to be true, solely on the basis that is is possible does not entail a rational justification, and it only gets more irrational when the basis consists of a conjunction of many propositions that are mere possibilities.
The point is that there are common patterns that conspiracy theories follow that reflect poor reasoning. Yes, they can individually be debunked, but common reasoning errors can also be identified. I mentioned a few in the post you responded to.
I didn't do that. I brought up creativity to distinguish it from abduction.
I'm reading "Against Method", and so far - it's confirming what I thought. He is NOT denigrating abduction; he's just saying it is not a process that is appropriate for advancing science- for a variety of very good reasons. New theory could never emerge if it were constrained to the old theoretical framework. It's necessary to think outside the box.
But this has no bearing on the reasonableness of utilizing abduction to make epistemic judgements to justify our beliefs in everyday life. It is absurd to give equal credence to every possibility on the sole basis of logical possibility- stronger epistemic support is needed. Abduction can provide that.
Good. Feyerabend is mistaken, but in interesting ways. Perhaps the most important aspect of his writing is his drawing attention to how the normatively inherent in scientific work is not algorithmic; the "best" hypothesis is not found using a fixed procedure; its lived and worked out within a community.
Perhaps we might continue when your finished.
Maybe start with Who is a Conspiracy Theorist?, in which she sets out some of the conceptual problems involved. It includes a video abstract.
Tsapos points out that on the common definition, we are all conspiracy theorists; yet few self identify as such (the problem of self identification). Also, if the class of conspiracy theorists includes almost everyone, then that class becomes useless as an analytic tool (the problem of theoretical fruitfulness). The term is either used merely rhetorically, in which case it is an example of "othering"; or it "collapse into already well-established concepts within cognitive psychology, thus failing the differentiation test for being a valuable addition to our conceptual toolbox."
A simplistic account of conspiracy theories as failing to apply abduction "correctly" begs for an explanation of what a "correct" application of abduction is; which remains problematic.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Banno
You can see the pattern here. When confronted by what seems like a dichotomy - description versus explanation - you feel a need to reduce it rather than understand its systems logic. You want to collapse a pincer movement to the simplicity of a monism. One thing has to be made the ground and the other shown to be merely derivative of that.
But dichotomies have a holistic logic. They identify complementary limits. They speak to the unity of opposites. Two things cut against each other.
So if we must divide things as descriptions vs explanations, I would point how they make sense as the complementary limits on inquiry and you would find every way to insist that only one could be the true ground.
And that is what I was pointing out in reminding that Peircean reasoning secures itself by going strongly in two complementary directions. Towards first deducing the logical consequences of some abductive leap towards an explanation, and then doing the other thing of seeking inductive confirmation of those worked-out consequences. So framing a theory a model of the causes and then doing the experiment. Generating predictions of observables. Measurements that are publicly understood within some communuity of inquiry as suitable evidence of a claim.
So far as the causation vs correlation debate goes, it should be plain that this Peircean method both accepts the Humean limits on knowledge and also challenges them. The whole business is proudly sociological. Truth arises within a community of inquiry.
Even what could count for correlations is subjective in the sense the rules for measuring need that common agreement. The principle of fallibilism arises quite naturally as hypotheses only get inductive level confirmation. We can jump in with our belief to get the ball rolling, but we bear in mind that we are only constraining our scope to doubt it. Reasonable levels of belief are all we can hope for in the end.
But then on the other hand there is the working out of the deductive consequences of some line of thought. Science is not just mere descriptions of the world when it has moved on to the structuralism of framing mathematical strength theories.
So you started bringing up the laws of nature. And in physics, these are solidly grounded on the mathematics of symmetry. Noether is just one example. The whole of relativity and quantum theory are rooted in explorations of symmetry principles and how they must shape the world in ways which have no other alternative. It is the same as when Plato talked about the five Platonic solids. Their existence are not a sociological fact or a descriptive fact. There just is no damn choice about it under the constraints of symmetry. We can be of sure of that as we can be of anything.
Which is to say, still not absolutely sure. Just as we can't be absolutely sure that when we read numbers off dials, well maybe we were a bit squiffy at the time. But as a community of inquiry, physics seems to know what it is doing. It has a ground both for its causal speculations and its correlational practices. It goes in both these directions strongly and so sets up the best available pincer movement with which to pin down a pragmatic description of physical reality.
So all the debate about the sociology of science is one thing. Of course science is sociological.
But what is going wrong here is your thesis that "everything is description, so nothing can be explanation". That sounds logical to the reductionist. But a holist can see why that is a big fail.
When you look at science, you find that it drives towards the two complementary limits of inquiry. Causal accounts and observational confirmation. Two things that must be connected by the third thing of their feedback impact on each other. Each direction must directly inform the other. Explanation must inform our descriptions and description inform our explanations.
So we can claim to know about causality once we have models framed at the level of mathematical structure. Possibility is itself limited by symmetry. And by producing the correlative evidence, we likewise limit the possibilities from the other angle of the inductive confirmation. Between the two, we can arrive at beliefs that are far from merely sociological.
That's a fair point, but my difficulty is that the word is almost always being used pejoratively and not substantively. For example, if we actually used the word the way you describe then we would say that according to a conspiracy theory a solar eclipse will occur on February 17th. That's simply not how the word is used.
Quoting hypericin
...And now we're back to the pejorative usage. If you are committed to your definition where a conspiracy theory is an explanation "containing multiple agents and moving parts that must act in perfect concert," then there is no reason to believe that "it is impossible to disabuse a conspiracy theorist of their theory." You are equivocating between a substantive and a pejorative definition.
If someone says that a solar eclipse will occur on February 17th, then on your definition they are a conspiracy theorist. It will also be perfectly easy to disabuse them of their theory, especially if their prediction turns out to be mistaken. You are involved in a kind of selection bias where you take everything that is a conspiracy theory by your substantive definition, and then exclude from that set everything that does not meet the implicit pejorative definition.
Quoting hypericin
This is another example of the pejorative equivocation.
Quoting hypericin
But it is. It is obviously irrational to select a theory based on one's personal psychological needs, to begin with the axiom that one must be correct, etc.
You want that symmetry be explanatory because its a necessary structure. The question remains as to whether that structure is in the world or in the description. Is symmetry foundational to the world, or foundational to our descriptions? Is it that the world just gets on with whatever it is doing, while we construct descriptions of symmetry?
But from Davidson, we might see that this very juxtaposition is fraught with presumption. I see you as working inside a conceptual scheme that is itself a false construction. The whole picture youre working with of structure vs correlation, complementary limits, systems logic is already suspect, or atl least already a construct.
We continue to talk past each other. There may be room for some form of reconciliation, since both Pierce and Davidson make use of holism. For Pierce there is a deep division between dialectic opposites that is healed by holism. For Davidson, that deep division is not there in the beginning - it's holism all the way down.
You wish for metaphysical explanations; but such explanations are inseparable from myth, not explanations so much as further descriptions and just-so stories. Your reading the necessary structure of the world into symmetry, into your complementary extremes, is not explanatory so much as more description. Meaning is not going to be found in the structure of the world, but is constructed by what we do with our language inside that world.
But there's a difference in our methodological dispositions that may be irreconcilable. I have an allergy to explanations of everything. I think complete explanations are completely wrong. So I'll leave you to your mythologising, and muddle along.
What seems to be missing from this discussion is that life can be full of accidents. So abduction has to be the kind inference that is filtering the events of the world in that light. Not all facts might be salient in a causal sense although accidental facts can occasion equal surprise.
Abduction thus would speak to this tricky thing of making smart judgements. What you are looking for are the clues to a causal explanation. Some logic that lies behind a pattern of events. The thing that brains are indeed evolved to do. And so why abduction seems such a psychological process and not really one that can be described as a formal method. It just how we can get started on the public and formal part, which is the deduction of consequences and inductive confirmation of the hypothesis we chose to throw out there in public.
So what we are inferring is that we can see through a haze of accidental particulars to the simple generality of some grounding causal constraint. Not every fact that seems surprising need also be salient. The salient facts give themselves away by starting to assemble into some kind of constraining pattern. The kind of general process that could have generated these particular facts in a non-accidental way.
Our brains are thankfully just rather good at such pattern processing. They are evolved to separate signal from noise.
To talk about abduction is just to highlight the fact that we do start out with some natural ability to find reasons in nature. We can perceive its structure. We can generalise its order.
And then we can get on with the business of constructing theories and running the tests. The epistemic technology that we socially construct to create that Peircean community of pragmatic inquiry.
What difference does it make to instead say the question remains as to whether that structure is in the world or in the explanation?
Quoting Banno
Again, your choice of terminology bakes in your conclusions.
Would my holism be concerned with completeness or the all-encompassing? Do I really yearn to list every detail. Make a complete description. Or do I instead want the ground of a most general explanation in terms of constraining whatever pragmatic task is at hand. Don't I say I seek the dichotomy as that which is the logically encompassing mutually exclusive AND jointly exhaustive?
So make your excuses and go. All you have proved to your own satisfaction is something I never really said. Not even close. :up:
Yes, pattern recognition is our strength, but it can also lead us astray at times. Just because we see the shape of a puppy in the clouds, doesn't imply there's anything truly dog-like up there. Just because we see a pattern of dice throws, doesn't imply the next throws are predictable. Just because some particular alignment of planets coincided with the nature of some type of event , doesn't imply there's truly a cause-effect relationship.
On the other hand, I suspect that great insights also come from pattern recognition. Einstein didn't work out general relativity by starting with a set of equations and see where they'd lead. He had a hunch, an insight that led him to mathematically connect the dots.
The formulator of, what becomes, a conspiracy theory - may see a pattern. In itself, that's perfectly fine. But errors creep in when he starts to apply confirmation bias, and fails to challenge some of his own assumptions. They stop trying to solve a problem, and begin just rationalizing their hunch. The problem accelerates when other like-minded people embrace it, and contribute to the rationalization, and praise each others' brilliance. The process is quite different from past, brilliant insights that have proved so fruitful. It's a corruption.
Yep. On this we agree.
We may have different notions of abduction. My conception of abduction certainly doesn't preclude novel thinking or "thinking outside the box".
I often hear it said that science doesn't progress through cumulative knowledge and understanding, but through paradigm shifts. I don't think it's entirely one or the other and I don't think the 'paradigm shift' paradigm is an accurate picture except at the broadest scales. How many historical scientific paradigm shifts can you think of ?
Quoting apokrisis
Yep. Banno began by arguing against explanation in favor of description, and has now fallen back to a different position, namely by opposing "complete" explanations. He has fallen back from arguing against a substantive position ("explanations are important to science," or something of the like), to arguing against the bogeyman of a "complete" explanation. Motte and bailey.
In the relevant cases, the "outside the box" means going in directions that are contradicted by current theory. In terms of abduction, the hypothesis is falsified before it's investigated. Even if this can be rationalized to abduction, the broader point is that they aren't being guided at all by abduction - but by something on the spectrum of idiotic wild-guess to brilliant insight.
But I still don't think this is the whole picture. There's still the matter of gaining broad acceptance. Einstein thought outside the box with his insight, but broad acceptance still depended on demonstrating how his theory was "better" than alternatives.
Quoting Janus
Kuhn came up with the "paradigm shift" view, and he discussed some historical examples that made sense to me when I read his book 40+ years ago. Examples I recall are Newtonian Gravity to General Relativity, and geo-centrism to helio-centrism. But I think you're right that these are rare.
But patterns have to be enduring to mislead us for longer than a few moments. A dog is hard to mistake for anything else as we can recognise it from all sorts of angles in all sorts of contexts.
Which again says something useful about the difference between an explanation and a description.
Quoting Relativist
Famously his happiest thought on gravity was imagining the weightlessness a man would feel falling of a roof. This led to the equivalence principle - the symmetry between gravity and acceleration. But of course Galileo had already put such a thought half in mind with his observation that a uniformly moving body feels no acceleration. And Einstein had been searching hard to include gravity into special relativity.
So hunches arise only in suitably constrained contexts. We suddenly see things from the right angle, having tried many other angles.
Quoting Relativist
Im watching this happen in real time after Charlie Kirks shooting. And the process is not so simple.
The problem is that we do live in a world where everyone is telling self-interested stories. Governments - even when their intentions are good - will edit the facts to make them palatable for public consumption. Any citizen who starts to dig into the facts as they are presented will always seem to find more and more that does not fit the narrative.
Long ago I noted that this was the wombat defence. Retreat into your burrow and turn your arse to the world. Block out all intrusive thoughts,
But AI now tells me that I was too hasty. Or at least why one wouldnt want to poke their head into his burrow in a hurry. :grin:
Biologists were equally obsessed over the debate whether evolutionary change was gradual or punctuated. And the best answer is that intermittently is what you get quite randomly. Nothing much happening then all the buses arriving at once.
So paradigm shifts are another such fake controversy. If progress or growth is happening, it is going to be happening freely over all its scales.
Paradigm shifts large and small, swift and slow, will be resulting from a collective habit of inquiry. And intermittency is in fact a statistical measure of this being the case. Paradigm shifts ought to be attracted to a powerlaw distribution if the underlying paradigm shifting process is freely doing its job.
Even apparent patternlessness is a fundamental pattern of nature that maths explains - rather than merely describes. Whatever wombats might otherwise believe.
That's part of the problem... the idea is equivocal.
Any way, back to the insults and misrepresentations from our friends.
So the problem is that it speaks to both sides? Curious.
For funs, I popped the question to AI. I well remember how aggressively dismissive you were of Peirce right from the start. Seems that Peirce's reappearance into public prominence would have indeed caused an issue.
So OK AI! Compare and contrast!...
Ooh dear. And I believe AI has extra training in being charitable in its replies.
But this was a useful prompt. It reminds me now that anomalous monism was the bugbear. Biosemiotics really killed that one stone dead.
"My daddy's a policeman..."
I forgot to include the bits where the similarities were stressed. And that was the original point too.
'How' questions seem to me to be more 'scientific' because they can end on the other side of the discussion when the questioner says "Show me!", after which the discussion hopefully turns to demonstration. Thus no science is done in discussions, but only in the laboratory, or the field.
And the distinction between good theory and conspiracy theory is also made there, and not in discussion.
There are elementary errors being made. Two in particular: bias and too little evidence.
A dearth of evidence implies a plethora of possibilities. Bias narrows the possibilities one considers.
Consider the Trump shooting last year. Some on right jumped to the conclusion that there was a leftist conspiracy. Some on the right thought it was contrived by Trump. Investigations have exposed no such conspiracies. Of course, coverups are possible, but possibilities are not evidence.
[Quote]Any citizen who starts to dig into the facts as they are presented will always seem to find more and more that does not fit the narrative.[/quote]
And some will rationalize the evidence that doesn't fit. For example, by claiming it's contrived by the conspirators. "This is what they want you to think." So it becomes further "proof" of the conspiracy, in their minds.
Some will resonate with this sentiment, no doubt. All the same, its a bit Orwellian in its nature, even if unintentionally so. This being the notion that there is no such thing as an objective (i.e., utterly impartial to all egos everywhere) truth to be had and thereby pursuedvery much including to questions of why. Why can 2+2=5 in addition to equaling four? Because Big Brother says so; and, therefore, so it can be.
Why did the avalanche happen? Because I/you/he/she/they/we so say/declare/reckon/will that it did. There is no objective truth to its reason for happeningthat is, none other than that it happened because I/you/he/she/they/we so say/declare/reckon/will that it did.
Orwell said a lot in favor of objective truth and the perils of this commonsense notions destruction by tyrantsincluding that he unfrivolously feared its loss in society more than he feared bombs of any kindbut heres a readily obtainable and easy to understand short quote of his:
(And yes, Im saying this via the lens of objective idealism, one to which objective truths thereby very much pertain. Point being, one need not be a physicalist to uphold the reality of objective truths via rational justifications for this common sense notion.)
But do we even know what really struck his ear and how the damage healed so fast? Everything was publicly witnessed in 4k and yet what are the facts? This kind of nonsense is a fascinating.
The footage isnt grainy anymore. And yet public truth only seems to grow more elusive. With photoshop having become AI, where is this going?
Yes. I used to be reassured that governments lied routinely but that also the truth would eventually be declassified. Wait 20 to 40 years and history would get written.
So the question becomes what is history telling us about the nature of truth and objectively so far as it matters in human affairs. The world has found it own pragmatic accomodation that bears perhaps only faint resemblance to what was considered its ideal.
I see a new approach to truth and fact in an analysis of how things have gone for real. We cant just assume we know what is best for social order even though Orwell felt like he was speaking for something we must defend.
Hence my interest in the new conspiracy theory industry on YouTube. Candace Owen and the like. Is this the new free press with the power to investigate or something compounding the problem, playing into the hands of information autocracy by amplifying the public confusion?
It used to be the case that life lived as truth seemed just commonsense. Now maybe life lived as conspiracy theory is what is and always has been real. Or life lived as a reality show. A juicy topic. Debord in the age of the accelerationist.
Yes, and the same could be said of AI.
But I don't think truth ever really dies. A conspiracy theorist with a YouTube channel that generates lots of views is relying on an equivocation. They rely on their audience (and perhaps themselves) believing that their end is truth when in fact it is views, or popularity, or drama, or something like that. When the dissimulation gets too far over its skies it becomes noticed that the person is not conveying truth but is instead merely gratifying their own desire for popularity, and at the point the game is up. The audience doesn't say, "Ah, well now we know for sure that none of this is true, but we're going to believe it anyway." That form of self-deception is only possible up to a point. The truth can only be ignored up to a point.
A family member of mine considers 3 "facts" to be proof positive it was staged: 1) Trump's injury was minor 2) he capitalized on the attempt in his campaign- including making out his injury to be worse than it was. 3) Trump's an asshole.
IMHO, that is not sufficient basis to draw that conclusion. It also overlooks the fact that the Secret Service (and FBI) identified negligence by the Secret Service.
So I think the evidence points to this being a genuine attempt on his life, although his actual injury was minor. Trump is apt to exaggerate, and he's adept at taking political advantage of anything. It played well to his devoted followers who consider him an emissary from.God.
I can see this and can develop it a bit more. As our technology progresses, AI included, we will (granting that by then we dont become extinct) eventually arrive at a future wherein everything knowable once again becomes for all practical purposes nothing short of oral tradition (as was generally the case for the Celts, the Dacians, the Native Americans, and so forth, to not here start on a long list of past cultures worldwide). For instance, its quite conceivable to me that at some future point of our technological evolution well devise a way to indiscernibly mimic carbon dating. That Torah there can be carbon dated to, say, 300 BCE, but it was manufactured just yesterday; or else this dinosaur fossil here, carbon datable to some 100 million years back, was likewise manufactured via nano-technology this past week. And so forth. Add in the moral relativism of might makes right and you could easily end up with both an epistemological and ensuing ontological nightmare for our global species of life.
Seems to me that is precisely one of the pivotal reasons for why a metaphysics' rational justification for there in fact being objective truth(s) becomes so enormously paramount to our future survival as a species. And this, maybe obviously to some, in non-infallibilist manners of justification. The likewise rationally justifiable objective truth regarding meta-ethics, explained in manners that accounts for all possible values and value theories, including that of The Good, also wouldnt hurtthis for the same purposes. Things I so far find lacking in the metaphysics you subscribe to, what I take to be the many good features it has asideand fundamentally physicalist though it may be. But, as always, feel free to demonstrate otherwise.
That's true and you have a point. But it is an argument from silence and as such falls short of being conclusive. There's a complication, though, that Hume is quite explicit about metaphysics and about the "Schoolmen's" concept of power. So far as I know, he doesn't explicitly discuss whether there is a reality distinct from experience, which is a bit odd. I don't know what to think.
However, I think it is a misrepresentation to call Hume a sceptic about this issue. He provided an account of causation as the result of an association of impressions and ideas that leads us to believe in causal relationships through "custom or habit". The issue about this account is that it seems to assert that we have this custom or habit but not to justify it. However, I think there are grounds for thinking that he thought that account did justify our custom.
It would be nice if that were true. But I think instead that people get used to living in a reality show. The fact that the dramas are made up becomes neither here nor there. Instead the heightened life becomes what absorbs us into its reality.
In any reality show, you know that the whole thing sits on some weird balance of people acting out plot lines and really also exposing their worst selves.
So reality shows became a huge industry. And conspiracy theory is now moving out of the fringe and into the mainstream. It is becoming corporate and industrial. It is a flourishing economy with a real power grip on society.
Charlie Kirk is an event. And now it becomes this seasons freshest hit. The Epstein show still rolls. But Charlie Kirk could become even splashier if any of the conspiracy analysis is even a little bit true.
Reality shows spawned something real enough in Donald Trump. Conspiracy shows are becoming mainstream franchises now. An even more blurred line. What does that look like when it is the new dominant form of media owned by those with a will to power?
I'll go further, but again nothing conclusive. First, you have to place him in his time-period, a time-period of heresies and the maybe yet occasional burning for such. Hume does mention and relies upon what he in his lexicon termed instincts. If I remember right, at one point or another even briefly alluding to lesser animals having the same as man, this in terms of considering causal relations (?). Kant replaced this notion with categories. When i read Hume, I thereby deemed his overall thesis regarding causality as being non-contradictory and thereby consistent with evolutionary inheritance of predispositions and behaviors via genotypes. Operant and classical conditioning in animals (and in humans), for one example, would be impossible without such innately held means of association. To me also interesting, Darwin did read Hume prior to his books on evolution, including his "On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals". But, no, nothing philosophically conclusive in any of this.
Of course. But my point was we still dont know what actually clipped his ear. Shrapnel seems the likeliest.
So here we have the double thing of the most unlikely close shave - an existential level ambiguity in itself. And then what seems like a quite unnecessary obsfucation over what the object in question was.
We like to treat reality as fundamentally intelligible or legible. And yet in 4K and slo-mo replay, it still aint.
It is like the move to refereeing sports by video analysis. In rugby, it turns out that nearly every try scored be perhaps ought to be disallowed as there is always some tiniest infringement to be found. Or at least a tiny infringement that one might as well see either way.
The general point is that truth is pragmatically complex. Do we loosen the grip of the narrative or tighten the definition of the fact. Back to the explanation-description dichotomy. :grin:
Well, again: Quoting javra
In other words, a metaphysics that via falliblist means rationally justifies the objective truth of meta-ethics in manners that account for all value systems: hence including the values held by those who willfully engage in activities which the average person might likely deem evil-doings but also including the neo-platonic value system of "The Good".
The question being, how does the metaphysics you subscribe to rationally justify the objective truth of such a meta-ethical reality? (Something, btw, which my "mushy" or such objectively idealist metaphysics, something yet in the process of being formally concluded in written form, is quite adept at. ((To illustrate this ain't posturing: You're free to check it out and try to falsify any part of its fallible conclusions. Link provided in my profile. The basic gist to meta-ethics is presented in Chapter 14. No pressure though; just if you're curious.) But I am asking you how your fundamentally physicalist metaphysical system does account for the objective truth of meta-ethics - this, maybe needless to add, in a manner that cogently accounts for all conceivable value structures present and past.)
So one example would be the shift from the popularity of WWF and WWE to the popularity of MMA. With the former there was a cognitive dissonance where one needed to pretend that a form of acting was not a form of acting, and the transition to the latter ironed out that cognitive dissonance. You get the same sort of event without the dissimulation.
Quoting apokrisis
Those are good points, but at the same time I think you will find that the conspiracy theorists need to take care not to get too far over their skies. The popularity distribution will be a bell curve between non-conspiratorial material and excessively conspiratorial material. The sweet spot must still mind the further extreme, and truth or plausibility is one of the central variables governing that sweet spot.
The development of a taste for the conspiratorial is almost certainly bad for the flourishing of a society, and in this case it looks to be a reaction to an overly unified media landscape. But when you introduce magnifiers like YouTube or AI it's hard to know whether the pendulum will swing in the same manner it has in the past, or if a new dynamic will emerge.
Ludwig rightly emphasizes that Hume rejects the idea of causation as a metaphysical reality. For Hume, causation is instead an aspect of our psychology: the association of impressions and ideas through custom or habit.
Javra agrees, and adds that these customs or habits may arise from the evolutionary inheritance of predispositions and behaviours via genotypes.
I would like to add that causal expositions can also be understood as a language gamean activity we perform in the world, using words to describe patterns and decide what to do next. In this sense, Humes customs or habits can be seen as a precursor to Wittgensteins language games. On this view, causes are not waiting out there in the world to be discovered; they are part and parcel of the way we interact with the world. This need not conflict with Javras account, but can complement it: our evolved predispositions may make us disposed to engage in these language games, generating causal explanations as part of practical life.
Thus, the focus shifts from grand metaphysical schemes to the practical question of how we act and respond to patterns in our experience.
How did you go from this:
Quoting Ludwig V
to this:
Quoting Banno
?
Quoting T Clark
But perhaps not.
That's right. For Hume (by implication), association of ideas and impressions is the one piece of equipment built in to your minds. (Contrast Kant). The thing is - again by implication - it is a causal account. Again, it would be very odd, wouldn't it, if a sceptic about causality proposed causal relationships to explain what causes are. I think the best way of understanding this is by comparison with Wittgenstein's exasperated "This is what I do."
Quoting Banno
Yes - emphasis on interaction. Hume doesn't seem to escape from the passive observer trying to piece the world together. But causality plays a vital role in our ability to do things in the world and to change things in the world. I think there is still a hunger for something beyond regularities - as everyone keeps reminding me, correlation is not causality. If that's not looking for a secret power, what does it mean? Regularities are a brute fact, perhaps.
Quoting Banno
Well, yes. But we do still use purposive explanations; the difference is that we only use them in specific domains and we don't (most of us) have a grand overall hierarchy of purposes and values. However, I'm not sure that material and formal causes make much sense any more.
Yes, he was one of the folks that discredited teleological and formal causes. (Not that I support him on this.) But it is due to him that we have a much firmer understanding of what efficient causes are to begin with. He defined their properties
As to this
Quoting Banno
Whatever metaphysics one subscribes to, we, genetically, phenotypically, consciously, are part and parcel of the metaphysics of the world. So no, while I maintain what I said, I don't agree with your interpretation of causation being unreal (metaphysical though it always is be definition).
.
I meant that Hume does not question the idea of causation itself; he questions, and rejects, a particular account of what (efficient) causes are.
Quoting Banno
I was referring partly to his rejection of metaphysics as such, and to his criticism of the traditional conception of causal powers.
Yep. Another resonating point. Especially as before Trump was on The Apprentice, he was part of WWE.
I used to like old school boxing but find modern MMA unwatchable. One claimed to showcase the skill, the other only the brutality. Though boxing was the deadlier sport in fact.
Games of dominance and submission. That is the genetic legacy that civilisation must build over. And to which civilisation can swiftly return. As again Trump is showing.
Boxing presented us the civilised and dignified face. Wrestling was the watered down, dress up version suited to kids TV. Now there is cage fighting - the old bare knuckle brawl - gone mainstream.
And Trump running the hegemonic power as a planetary dominance and submission reality show.
Quoting Leontiskos
I completely agree. That is why I focus on Candace Owens as a particular case in point. The medium is evolving fast. It is too easy to dismiss it for its history on the fringes and its WWE levels of believability.
Quoting Leontiskos
My suggestion is that the media may evolve but it always becomes what power must capture and control. And that exists in tension with the power of the people to resist.
So the printing press at first liberated people power - taking back the written world from the social elite. Then it became the tool of class factions and eventually the liberal order, such as it was.
How is the internet likely to fare in that regard? How do things go as even social media crashes into the new AI paradigm.
That is why I now toy with AI as the instant fact checker on PF opinion. It is interesting to introduce a neutral referee into this little social game of dominance and submission. To understand where things might go, one must experiment with the new forms. :razz:
That nicely frames the incipient circularity in explaining causation in terms of evolution. To make use of evolutionary explanations, we are already talking in terms of causation. It's not mistaken, so much as unsatisfactory.
Quoting Ludwig V
This is where we might sidestep Wittgenstein and invoke Davidson. We might overcome Hume's passive observation using something like Davidson's interactive process of interpretation; which is itself a development from Wittgenstein's language games. We sidestep the circularity problem by seeing causation not as something to be explained only by invoking causal mechanisms but as something continuously enacted and interpreted in practice.
Added, for @javra: And that is an evolved practice.
Or rather, there is a pragmatic need to be able distinguish the contingent from the necessary. The differences that make a difference from the differences that dont.
Neurocognition tells us how we are organised to sift the world into the facts we must attend to and the facts we can safely ignore.
Facts aint any kind of facts until they have been properly dichotomised along those semiotic lines.
I gave my family member's reasoning, and mine. Don't you agree mine is more reasonable?
Is the argument that abduction can be used to pick out which theories are conspiracy theories? Then what counts as a conspiracy theory is which "conclusions are more reasonable than others"; but a conspiracy theorist may just insist that the conspiracy is the more reasonable conclusion.
Hence Melina Tsapos' conspiracy definition dilemma.
As in the rock intended to start the avalanche that happened by intending to pursue gravitational paths of less resistance down the mountain just so?
That would make a rather extreme animist of you. Not even the spiritualists I've encountered hold such views.
Why questions all presuppose purpose, ends toward which things move physically or otherwise, and hence teleological causation - of which intents, and hence intentionality, is just one relatively minor instantiation of within the cosmos at large. The reason why leaves flutter is not because the wind so wills it. Lest we loose track of what are poetic truths and what is objectively real.
But I guess none of this matters much when causes are taken to be unreal. No objective truth to them to speak of - only the invented illusory truths of those who domineeringly subjugate the minds of others. What tyrant wouldn't approve?
(Still very much concur with Orwell's perspective.)
That'd be more a "how" than a "why" - how the avalanche started rather than why.
Quoting javra
Yep.
What's proposed is causation not as an external thing to be explained but as a feature of our ongoing engagement with the world. Saying that causes are unreal would be a misrepresentation. Pushing the trolly causes it to move, hence it's true that pushing the trolly caused its movement. That's not an antirealist ploy.
Added:Quoting javra
Reconsidering, "Why did the leaves flutter - because the wind blew them" presumes neither intent nor purpose. Fair point.
Davidson treats intentions as causal, after all. I'll give @unenlightened's post some more thought.
Why did the wind blow? - because of areas of differing atmospheric pressures.
Why were there differing areas of atmospheric pressures? - because of solar heating on a rotation earth.
Why was there solar heating on a rotation earth...
Each of these presents a broader description.
Do we end with "because godswill" or perhaps "Becasue triadic thingumies"?
Of course. But I was discussing conspiracy theorising in general. As in the sociologic context of what can count as legitimate belief.
In the modern world, is your anti-conspiratorial stance still the legitimate thing? Can the truth even be secured without accepting a dash of conspiratorial doubt given the fact that even the well intentioned have reason to gloss over or edit the facts as they might exist.
If correlation aint causation, well what if even correlation aint much of a fact either. Even description cant ground truth.
All this arises from my point that truth is a pincer movement. We can make objective measurements, but even these become subjective facts. So pragmatism requires we also do equal work on the causal explanation side. We must have grounded logic - that pesky all-encompassing theory of everything.
The best we can do is play the two sides of this dichotomy off against each other. Conspiracy theories show how the facts are always irreducible ambiguous. We cant rely absolutely on them. But where conspiracy theory falls down is often on some grounding holism of causal logic.
We could ask if the world really works in a way where it is reasonable that Charlie Kirk was popped at close range with some kind of special bullet fired by Azov regiment agents on the behest of Israeli forces, with Tyler Robinson set up as the patsy with AI doctored footage of him clambering of a rooftop, etc?
Anything is possible. So the burden shifts to what - by logical constraint - remains credible.
We can pretend life is a science project or learn to assess situations in more pragmatic fashion. A skill becoming more necessary everyday it seems.
But again my point is how even for conspiracy theories, it cuts both ways. We are in a new media era where there is vastly more individual capacity to data mine and fact check. We can find out what is real about public events to a degree that we couldnt before. That should be a good thing. And couple that power to a general rationality - an ability to step back with a world view that asks, well what are the odds - then conspiracy thinking could morph into something valuable. Producing needed social change.
Im not giving Candace Owen high marks as yet. I just think this is a very interesting space. Especially if AI could be a neutral judge on the balance of the odds. The media has always evolved. But the pace of that is now really fast. And theories of truth need to keep up to date.
Reductionism is always caught on the horns of a dilemma. Just as for PoMo, everything is mired in self-refuting paradox.
There is a reason why the unity of opposites is the more reasonable totalising framework when it comes to a metaphysical ground for our habits of mind.
Not when it's an explanation for why the avalanche happened. Quite obviously I would think.
Quoting Banno
OK then. Point being that not all purposes are intentions or else intentional. The rock's movement ended in there being an avalanche. In this very affirmation, there is a presupposed background of teleological reason in the form of "something's movement toward an addressed as of yet unactualized end/telos resulted in the actuality of the end addressed" and thereby caused the given effect. There's two glitches, though. The rock is devoid of intentions it wills to accomplish, for it it devoid of sentience and thereby will. Debatable within panpsychism contexts, true, but more importantly, to so consider all whys dependent on purpose in one way or another is to claim that all inanimate physical givens nevertheless do what they do sans intentionionality for the sake of accomplishing some ultimate end. Otherwise, there'd be nothing purposeful to it.
I can live with this. Can you?
Especially when you state that:
Quoting Banno
Yep, one cant avoid dichotomising. But it is the unifying that separates the reductionists from the holists.
How and why dont have to be a dilemma - two disconnected monisms. Anomalous monisms indeed. They can instead be the two limits of inquiry. As in the material and formal causes of substantial being. Aristotles hylomorphism.
How always needs a why, and why always needs a how. So no dilemma. Just the opposing bounds on inquiry that we then bring back together to account for the whole. :up:
Yep.
See the musings added to the previous post. You've got me rethinking my reply to Un.
Is there a problem?
I realise you would prefer a public fluffing and then you might graciously dole out your little morsels of Davidsonian wisdom mixed in with exciting news about what you have planned for lunch.
But sorry that aint happening. Im here for the contest of ideas. Not to play your popularity competition. The good old days of like buttons and bragging about the inordinate length of your threads.
If you want my respect, it has to be earnt, Show up with an argument. And make it interesting. Give that a try.
That's cool
Quoting Banno
I have a problem with this part:
Quoting Banno
Neither of these present an ultimate end as the teleological reason for what is. Godswill is a mouthful: what is this "god" supposed to be to begin with, for example; is it supposed to be an omni-creator deity which created everything, including right and wrong and truth and falsehood, in line with the "His" own whims. If so, then this god cannot rationally equate to the divinely simple unmoved mover of everything that is as teleological ultimate end, for whims and creations are aspects, parts, of His being - which cannot be rationally said to occur within divine simplicity. ... A rather expansive subject. In a roundabout manner same with "triadic thingness": it is a supposed explanation for what is that cannot serve as an ultimate teleological end of what is: for starters, it doesn't predict that the cosmos's ultimate end is that of triadic thingness.
I know, these can be argued back and forth. But I think I'll be leaving that to others. Still, I can't find either to be that ultimate end which teleologically determines all that is, was, and will be - our myriad intentionings very much included - till the time this ultimate end is actualized.
But again, if nothing is certaineven conceptuallythen you can't weigh anything as more or less certain. The labels "conspiracy theory" or "inference to the best explanation" are never substantive labels given that they always involve a begging of the question. The "conspiracy theorist" is always the other guy, just as the guy with the best explanation is always me.
If someone's theory is bad, then you should say why it is bad in a way that would be convincing even to them. If your explanation is good or the best, then you should say why it is such. Labels like "conspiracy theory" or "inference to the best explanation" don't add anything substantial to a conversation, particularly when they lack context.
For example, if you have a number of different explanatory kinds in your belt, and one of them is IBE, then labeling one of your explanations an IBE is intelligible vis-a-vis the differentiation it provides. But when you continually say that IBEs are all there is and also claim that "IBE" means something intelligible, you aren't making much sense.
Or riffing on my parasitic idea from earlier, you can't talk about an "inference to the best explanation" if you aren't able to tell us what an explanation is. And if you say that an explanation (or every particular explanation) is an inference to the best explanation, then you've fallen into the viciously circular quandary. If you give a traditional account of what an explanation is, then we already have an alternative to an IBE, at least from an ontological perspective, and therefore not every account is (or professes to be) an IBE.
There are a number of folk on this forum who reject all substantive approaches to causality and explanation, substitute in their term "inference to the best explanation," and think they have won the day. But this is a rather confused move. If there are no real explanations, can there really be any best explanations? If I don't have even a conceptual understanding of what counts as an explanation, then how am I to know how to identify better or lesser explanations?
Me, too. It's intended to show how the "why" doesn't end satisfactorily in at least some cases.
There's a whole side road concerning intentionality here, that is well worth considering. At issue is the difference, if any, between these and other causal explanations. All good stuff.
Do we go there, in this thread?
No. Rather, abduction would tend to rule out theories that are commonly called conspiracy theories, but it's irrelevant whether they've been labelled as that.
As far as I'm concerned, anything goes when it comes to proposing an explanatory hypothesis. Brainstorming works best when unconstrained. But applying abduction results in sorting out from consideration those hypotheses that have the weakest support.
Quoting Banno
You can lead a horse to water....
But not really relevant. I argue that we think abductively all the time: we make epistemic judgements based on data too sparse to draw a deductive conclusion. This isn't about trying to convince anybody, it's about ourselves thinking critically.
Of course, it does help to review one's hypothesis with others, to invite criticism - hearing different perspectives on the body of facts (adding, removing, revising), exposing our biases, and hearing alternative interpretations. But ultimately, we all make our own epistemic judgements.
If our case IS sound (in an abductive sense), then it probably would convince others, but that's a byproduct.
.
The problems I want to point out apply to abduction considered as being normative - as involving choosing between hypotheses. So, to your account.
How is it that "abduction would tend to rule out theories that are commonly called conspiracy theories"? What's the basis for the selection?
The criticism I began with is that if you set out those criteria, if you set out your expectations for a good hypothesis, then what you are in effect doing is choosing only the hypotheses that meet those expectations; I somewhat hyperbolically called that "confirmation bias" - you get what you want, an so perhaps not what you need.
On this approach, is any theory that does not meet one's expectations a conspiracy theory? Seems to be so, unless there is some additional criteria.
Next step was introducing Feyerabend, who shows historical cases in which going against expectations and logical conclusions leads to progress in science - were irrationality leads to choosing the better theory. His argument gets a bit deeper than that, but there's a start, since this is counter to the naive view of abductuion as choosing the best theory.
Now some care is needed here. We agree that we do "make judgements based on data too sparse to draw a deductive conclusion". what I am baulking at is calling these judgements "abduction", if what is meant is that they are correct, or true, or worse, necessary.
All up, it seems to me that there remains a hole in your account, that explains the why of how we must choose this hypothesis over that one.
Suppose you can't find your car keys, one morning. What possibly happened to them? Did it fall into an interdimensional portal; did a poltergeist hide them? Did a monkey come through an unlocked window and take them? Was there a glitch in the matrix? The possibilities are endless. But only a few are truly worth consideration, like - maybe you. left them in the pants you were wearing, you dropped them, left them on the kitchen table, or in the car.
More generally, it is often the case that we would consider some possibilities more credible/plausible/likely than others. Examples:
-It's quite plausible for one person to keep a secret, but less plausible that hundreds can keep the same secret for decades with no noticeable slip-ups (this is one common problem with conspiracy theories).
-Suppose you have 2 alternative possibilities, but there is supporting evidence for only one. Evidence gives a good reason to treat it more credibly.
Quoting Leontiskos
That assumes the other person is reasonable. I actually did explain to my sister-in-law why her belief that Trump staged his assassination attempt was flawed, and she just responded that I give Trump too much credit.
Another factor: background beliefs. They are factors that influence our judgements. Of course, they can be challenged, but how deep do we ever go? People are apt to get frustrated or pissed off before a meeting of the minds is reached.
Yet another factor: Some people are more apt to make clear epistemic judgements, and some are more apt to reserve judgement. There's no objectively correct point at which judgement is deemed appropriate, although one ought to try an be consistent. This is a factor in past judgements that are within our background beliefs - so there's an abundance of reasons why 2 reasonable people may disagree.
Quoting Leontiskos
Agreed.
Quoting Leontiskos
In this context, an explanation is a conclusion someone is drawing from some set of evidence and background facts.
Quoting Leontiskos
I don't know what your talking about regarding "causality and explanation". But I'd say that an IBE is always a conclusion, but it may simply be a conclusion to reserve judgement. For example: is there a "best" interpretation of Quantum Mechanics? IMO, no- because they are all consistent with the measurements- there's no objective basis to choose one, so I think we should reserve judgement.
We often don't have multiple, distinct "explanations" to choose from; we're just assessing whether or not there's sufficient justification to support an assertion. We examine this justification and decide whether to affirm it, deny it, or reserve judgement. It's the same process, whether or not we choose to label it abduction.
"Snow likes to be very quiet, and when someone disturbs it, it does its best to quieten them down."
The point I am making is more so grammatical. Of a living being, one can ask why they did something, and how they did something and get very different answers.
"Reasons why" ask for motives: The tiger killed the goat because it was hungry.
"How" asks for effective method: The tiger killed the goat by creeping through the pampas grass stealthily from downwind and springing suddenly upon it.
So I would rather suggest that my reasoning is that avalanches and snow do not reason, and therefore the question of why they happen is inappropriate. 'How an avalanche happens' one can ask, but 'why' is indeed the question of an extreme animist, or else a 'how' question in inappropriate and misleading disguise.
Thus 'why', asks about reasoning, about the mind in question, and 'how' asks about practicalities and events. I think this simple distinction can resolve much of the controversy. If there seems to be no mind, do not look for reasons why. Because it will only confuse and annoy. Because I said so! Because this is how the language works.
In boxing you have the repeated blows to the head resulting in long term brain injury.
The "punch-drunk" syndrome.
In boxing the primary target is the head.
Boxers sustain hundreds of sub-concussive blows per fight and in training.
In MMA you have a single blow to the head instead of multiple repeated blows.
Then appreciate how this relates to what I'm saying about IBEs. My explanation is "better".
Quoting apokrisis
I don't have an "anti-conspiratorial stance". Conspiracies certainly occur. However, large scale conspiracies involving hundreds or thousands of people, particularly over many years, with 100% adherence to maintaining the fiction is implausible. Faking the moon landing would require this. A "false flag" operation by the US government in taking down the WTC on 9/11 would require this. It's an inherent implausibility in many conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies are apt to be exposed when very many are involved- some will screw up; some may have second thoughts.
Quoting apokrisis
Absolutely! That's exactly what I'm talking about.
Quoting apokrisis
Absolutely: we have an abundance of easily accessible information. In a perfect world, everyone would apply good epistemic judgement when trying to make sense of the information. In our imperfect world, we can at least strive to do this ourselves. This means trying to avoid being overly influenced by our biases (as in the case of my sister-in-law); it means valuing evidence over pure conjecture; it means considering the plausibility of claims; it means being willing to reevaluate our assumptions instead of tenaciously rationalizing our initial reactions. We can also attempt to persuade and to discuss the need for good epistemic judgement, but we also should be open to being persuaded by good reasoning.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't know much about her, so I checked Wikipedia. Apparently she promotes a variety of conspiracy theories. From this, I infer she has poor epistemic judgement, and thus I would'nt gain much but listening to her. It would be foolish for anyone to uncritically accept the claims of anyone with that track record.
There's a reason the term "conspiracy theory" has evolved to entail being irrational: they entail a set of common errors of epistemic judgement. Don't take my word* for it, but do examine the basis for any theory you find intriguing.
* The wikipedia article on conspiracy theories is worth a read.
In answer to the question: we could dispense with using the term "conspiracy theory" entirely, and simply apply good epistemic judgement to any theory that comes along. Let's consider some factors that affect this judgement.
1) I contend that more credence should be given to claims that are supported by evidence, than those that are purely speculation. Often, the evidence is insufficient to establish the claim beyond reasonable doubt (or some other standard we might apply). So it is of course possible the speculation is true, and the one supported by evidence is false. But have we made an error of judgement? Possibilities are endless, so if we dwell on all possibilities, we will never make a judgement - we'll be lost, wandering through a forest of possibilities. We can make a judgement, while remaining open to revising it when we learn more. Maybe evidence supporting the speculation will come out.
2) Plausibility is a factor in epistemic judgement. This will be a function of background beliefs, but it's grossly impractical to start from the ground up when judging every claim. I've said it's implausible that hundreds or thousands of people could maintain a conspiratorial secret for any extended period of time. It would entail unwavering commitment to the cause, and perfect competence by all. I can't claim it's impossible, but I judge it to be grossly implausible. I apply this as a background belief when judging a claim. But because it's possible, I could be missing an exception by ruling it out prematurely,. But again: possibilities are endless, so if we're going to make a judgement, we need to narrow down the possibilities.
Quoting Banno
His case studies do not entail choosing a best theory. I'll interject Kuhn's "scientific revolutions" concept - these entail a sort of selecting of a better theory. It's a process that is gradual and collective, not an individual sitting down and juxtaposing the respective theories and applying some rules, but the process has the same net effect.
There's another issue that is unique to science:"The history of science, after all, does not just consist of facts and conclusions drawn from facts, problems created by conflicting interpretations, mistakes, and so on. On closer analysis we find that science knows no "bare facts" at all but that the "facts" that enter our knowledge are already viewed in a certain way and are, therefore, essentially ideational. This being the case, the history of science will be as complex, chaotic, full of mistakes..."
[Feyerabend, "Against Method", p 3).
I can't find the quote, but elsewhere he discusses the fact that scientific theories are invariably inconsistent - they entail come contradictions or other clear falsehoods (example: the cosmological constant problem). This provides a strong reason to set aside the commonly accepted theoretical framework, at times (let's not forget that progress is also made within current theoretical frameworks).
These issues don't apply to everyday epistemic judgments. Of course, you COULD point to various metaphysical theories that could call everything into question (e.g. idealism, solipsism), but such an approach is as unpragmatic as you can get. It's hard enough to navigate the world just in the way we commonly view it, so (IMO) it's silly to be paralyzed by these various metaphysical possibilities.
Quoting Banno
I agree, and that's why I'm referring to them as "epistemic judgements". It would be unwarranted to claim a judgement made through abduction constitutes knowledge, in the strictest sense, or that it entails necessity. Even more so than the lip-service we give to the epistemic status of scientific theories: they can only be warranted as provisional. The "best" in "inference to best explanation" isn't an absolute claim that there can be no better explanation. It's simply a judgement that the selected hypothesis is best, among the options considered.
Does that fill the hole you mentioned?
Interesting - I did not know that.
Quoting apokrisis
That seems right to me.
Quoting apokrisis
Okay, but can you elaborate on this? I'm not too familiar with Candace Owens. I know she broke off from a media company, went her own way, and become more idiosyncratic and conspiratorial (much like Tucker Carlson). And is the "medium" you speak of conspiratorial thinking, or something else?
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, I think that's quite right.
Quoting apokrisis
Right. I tend to share Baden's worries that he expressed in a thread that has up and vanished.
Quoting apokrisis
I haven't used it for philosophy much, but I have tried the LLMs for other things. I agree that one must keep abreast of such things.
The great thing about is that @Banno holds the "opinions" of AI in high regard, and often utilizes them himself. I think that's part of the reason why he got so quiet after seeing his own theories debunked by his own authorities.
But isn't it just a truism to say that one should prefer the better to the worse? That's why a preference for the best is not a substantial position. Everyone agrees with it and everyone thinks their theory is better than other theories.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Relativist
But how does any of this address the point at stake? I don't even know if you are agreeing or disagreeing with my statement.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Relativist
The point is that you must do more than beg the question. The label "conspiracy theory" is too broad, bordering on things as broad as "bad" or "irrational." If one wants to engage in rational discourse, then they must offer reasons, and "bad", "irrational", and "conspiracy theory" don't really count as reasons. More generally, one must offer arguments and not assertions.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Relativist
Good, but do you also agree that if everything is an IBE then there is no intelligibility given that no differentiation is possible? If so, then you must possess alternative approaches other than IBE if 'IBE' is to be a meaningful notion.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Relativist
Okay, good. So would we say that, at least in some cases, there is the real explanation and nominal explanations are better or worse depending on how well they approximate the real explanation? If so, then an IBE is presupposing the ontological existence of an aitia/cause/explanation.
Quoting Relativist
So would you say that when someone argues for one particular interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, they are not offering an IBE?
Quoting Relativist
But that doesn't seem very principled. If there is not more than one explanation, then how can you talk about an inference to the best explanation? It seems like you now want "inference to the best explanation" to include any judgment that there is sufficient justification to support an assertion. But that's not what the words mean. "This is the best explanation" is not the same as, "This assertion possesses sufficient justification." "Best" and "sufficient" are not the same concept. It seems that you are being too loose with words and concepts, and that is much the point.
If I were teaching a logic class I would ask you to provide an argument for your conclusion, "...Therefore, no conspiracy theory is an IBE."
If you reply that some conspiracy theories are IBEs, but this is rare, I would point out that the conspiracy theorist agrees with you. The conspiracy theorist would not be a conspiracy theorist if they thought that conspiracy theories were common or mundane explanations. It is precisely the rarity that they are attracted to.
Yep. I said boxing was in fact the deadlier. :up:
Sure. And I was talking about how it would be better. What best might mean.
Quoting Relativist
I mentioned her as an example of conspiracy theory going mainstream in a more potent fashion.
No, because we're employing reason to guide the choice, not just what feels "best". We're evaluating the evidence, considering plausibility, reflecting on our personal biases...everything I've talked about.
Quoting Leontiskos
My point is that we can often make finer distinctions than simply possible/impossible.
I think I previously mentioned "modest Bayesianism" to you. This is the claim that for SOME pairs of propositions, we can justifiably judge one to be more likely than the other. This doesn't entail a commitment to attach a numerical probability to all propositions that could be used in a Bayesian probability calculation.
The examples I gave illustrate this. If you're going to treat all possibilities the same, no matter how remote, you will get nowhere in making epistemic judgements.
Quoting Leontiskos
Of course! I'll go further: discussing our reasoning with others can help us improve our judgements, by getting additional facts before us, and alternative theories. It forces us to think through our reasoning with more rigor, and to justify the various intermediate judgements that lead to the position we're defending.
Quoting Leontiskos
Absolutely not. I can't imagine why you'd suggest no differentiation is possible. Do you worry about losing your keys in an interdimensional portal? Do you worry your spouse might be an extra-terrestrial? If you do not differentiate, how can you ever make ANY decision?
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, to the 1st question (I think).
I don't understand the 2nd. What's the ontological status of descriptions of events in the public sphere? What does it matter? The appropriate objective is truth, and this is irrespective of one's preferred theory of truth, theory of mind, or the metaphysical foundation of reality.
Quoting Leontiskos
If they're arguing for it, they are probably explaining why they consider it an IBE. My position today is simply that I reserve judgement, and I could go into a bit more detail as to why. I've read defenses of Many Worlds, of ontological wave function collapse, and of Bohmian "pilot wave" theory. Each is coherent, none are verifaible or falsifiable. Also, while it's interesting, there is no interpretation that will impact my life or the real-world choices I have to make daily.
Quoting Leontiskos
There's always more than one explanation, in principle. Suppose only one explanation is before us, but I judge it very unlikely to be true. This implies there is some unavailable truth of the matter.
Example. An amateur Christian apologist I used to engage with made the claim we should all accept Jesus's resurrection as true, because there is (at least) some evidence it occurred (e.g. the Gospels, early belief in it, alleged martyrdom) and no evidence of alternatives. He was arguing the Resurrection is the "best explanation" of available evidence. But for other reasons - I regard it as grossly implausible. So I reserved judgement as to how to account for the Gospel stories, early belief, and alleged martyrdom. I still think that was appopriate. This general problem in abduction is called being "the best of a bad lot".
Since then, I've read a good bit about critical Biblical scholarship, so now I could proffer some general alternative hypotheses- but I also judge that no specific theory can have sufficiently strong support to warrant accepting it as true.
I just suggested watching Owens on Charlie Kirk for two reasons. The first is as a polished example of the new media. Tucker Carlson and Fox News in general turned conspiracy theory into a powerfully profitable and self-sustaining industry. Now you have huge money going into self-organising YouTube communities where the viewers get to be part of the reporting team.
Everyone is tied into a tight circle where the skill at discovering conspiracies improves for all. You are not just passively viewing Fox and its weirdos. You are being drawn into the industry in an active way.
The other thing is then how there is so much information to keep the story going. Every event has so much cell phone footage from so many angles, or citizens sleuths running around interviewing each other, immediately finding all the strange coincidences that are going to be there to be found. With so many involved on the ground, there are swiftly any number of dots for a conspiracy theory to join.
Quoting Leontiskos
Even months ago, AI gave a lot of shit answers. Good only for a laugh. But now it is becoming very useful for self factchecking.
Of course, you then have to be in the habit of self factchecking. :smile:
Banno feels like he is here to run the cosy introductory philosophy tutorials of his fond memory. That would be why he treats us like confused first year students having to retread the well worn paths of ancient debates. We are allowed to speak, but as tutor, he gets to steer and gently reveal our neophyte errors of thought. We should be warmly appreciative of his condescension. And learn to stick closely to areas where he has already prepared the answers.
The point is clear, I hope - evidence is always equivocal. There is always a point about which folk may disagree.
Quoting Relativist
No one would disagree ( :wink: ). At issue is how "supported by evidence" is payed out. From Quine-Duhem, we see that there are always ways to question the evidence. So the issue becomes when questioning the evidence is reasonable, and when it isn't. And it seems there is often no clear clean place at which to draw the line.
Hence,
Quoting Relativist
And not the result of the application of an algorithmic method. I think you see this, but perhaps what's been said here will better articulate it.
Feyerabend's conclusion is that "Anything Goes" in choosing between hypotheses. That's too far. The trouble with "anything goes" is that we are obliged to choose, and so if anything goes, we may as well choose the easiest path, which will be what we already hold true - again, a recipe for confirmation bias. The trouble with "anything goes" is that it will amount to "everything stays the same".
But instead we can admit that the process is fraught with difficulty, and not so clean and clear as some theorists would suppose. Scientific method is not algorithmic, but communal. It is human, involving the interaction of many, many people in an organised and cooperative fashion. I'd argue that this process involves not interfering with the work of others, responding to their claims in a way that is relevant, and doing so publicly; basic liberal virtues. Values not on show in places in this very thread.
Part of that is the issue of demarcation, the separation between science and non-science, which relates to your discussion of conspiracy theories. The idea is that conspiracy theories are not scientific; they do not conform to scientific methods. Now this is I think pretty much toe right sentiment, but given that we are unable to set out what that scientific method is quite as clearly as some suppose, and hence that the difficulty in setting out what counts as a conspiracy theory and what doesn't, a bit of humility might be needed. It won't help to just tell a conspiracy believer that their theory does not match the evidence, because for them it does.
Okay, I will have a look. I generally don't watch conspiratorial material because it causes the algorithm to give me more of the same, and this muddies up my feed (and I don't have a VPN to fully insulate myself). But I'll suck it up for once. :razz:
Quoting apokrisis
Fascinating.
Quoting apokrisis
I tend to use it in areas where the programming and the training would tend to produce an accurate response, but I think it is deceptively difficult to gauge its reliability. The manner in which we vet and eventually come to trust an authority turns out to be a rather complex process.
Quoting apokrisis
I can vouch for that a hundred times over. Awhile back there was a wild thread where Banno chastised his wayward students, insinuating that the deplorables were forcing him into private message conversations. The thread didn't go well for Banno and had to be closed by the mods, which I ahead of time. :lol:
Okay, I agree.
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Relativist
If everything is an IBE, then what sense does it make to exhort someone to engage in IBE? Or to argue in favor of IBEs?
Quoting Leontiskos
Quoting Relativist
Let me put it this way: if some explanations are better and some are worse, then what are they better or worse in relation to?
For example, if I run a 100m dash in 16 seconds and you run it in 13 seconds, by what standard do we say that you did better than I? Isn't it by the standard, "The shorter the time, the better" (which is equivalent to, "The faster, the better")?
1. If there are better and worse explanations, then they must be better or worse relative to some standard
2. The standard is the true explanation
3. The true explanation is not an IBE
4. Therefore, not everything is an IBE
If Sherlock Holmes is working a case then he has any number of candidate theses floating around his head. Some are better than others. Also, something actually happened in reality that he is trying to understand. The best explanation will (arguably*) be the one which most closely approximates the thing that happened in reality. That is what his spectrum of worst/worse/better/best is aiming at.
Note too that there may be a witness who knows exactly what happened. They know the answer to the question that Holmes is asking. I don't think we would call their knowledge an IBE. They have the answer to the question, "What happened here?," and that answer is not an IBE.
My point is that if you try to make everything an IBE, then IBEs make no sense. An inference to the best explanation presupposes the possibility of the real explanation. Depending on our questions and their level of specificity, a single real explanation may not be possible, but in many cases it is possible, and especially so in a theoretical or conceptual sense.
Quoting Relativist
Okay, sure. I don't want to get into that tangent, as I think it might take us too far afield.
* "Arguably" in the sense that we don't have to get into the subtopic of better-relative-to-available-evidence vs. better-relative-to-the-reality-being-investigated.
From you, yes.
Yes. The advantage of PF over the more focused private chats one might have with one's peers is that it is so wide open and the challenges come from all directions. That's what I like. Having to fend off all possible viewpoints. The uncontrolled element is the greatest part of the appeal.
But to come on PF and find someone fussing about like a prim substitute teacher, trying to make a class of larrikins stick to the kind of syllabus that would have been acceptable to a 1960s Oxbridge don, is a major irritation.
Quoting Banno
Oh and that is the other annoying thing. Everything truly has to be about him in egocentric fashion. He really is gratified as even being scorned is still being noticed.
And as you say, show us the argument. Earn the respect. Take your chances along with the rest of us.
And will continue to be so, as long as you two talk about me rather then the topic at hand.
You don't have to make this a conversation about me. But you choose to. You can stop any time you like.
I didn't start the conversation about me. But I am happy to encourage it.
:lol: :lol: :lol:
Quoting Leontiskos
I haven't gotten something across to you guys some of my basic contentions:
1) Most of our beliefs are established as subjective inferences to best explanation. Consider the alternatives: few beliefs are established by deduction, and few are basic. What else is there?
Someone who believes the 9/11 destruction of the twin towers was a false flag operation by the US government believes that this best explains the "facts" that he "knows".
But he's made errors in his analysis: errors we can identify by presenting my own IBE. This could entail identifying additional facts, debunking falsehoods he accepts (through another IBE), identifying implausible background assumptions he's making. This would be MY subjective IBE, but if I've done it correctly, I expect it would persuade any rational person to drop their belief in this conspiracy.
If I succeeded at that, you might characterize my argument as an objective reason to reject the theory. I don't characterize it that way, because I'm viewing this in terms of establishing belief. A sound argument listed in a logic textbook, or on an internet forum, has no relevance to anyone unless they read it, understand it, and accept it - thus establishing a belief.
2) A belief established by IBE is rationally justified if done "correctly". I've discussed some aspects of valid analysis . Example: it takes into account all the relevant information known to the person: (we shouldn't cherry pick; we're not omniscient).
3) a belief that has been rationally justified by abduction can be rationally defeated by another IBE (e.g. one that includes previously unknown or overlooked information; undercutting an assumption on the basis of implausibility).
-
So if the universal mind cannot have perfect knowledge, we as mere mortals cannot posses it as well.
I agree. We're discussing IBEs, and doing them rationally. Two reasonable people could reach different conclusions on the same data, because subjective judgement is usually involved. This includes judging what is plausible:
Quoting Banno
Yes!
Quoting Banno
I don't agree with framing it that way - because the issue is epistemology, not science per se. This includes applying epistemology to science, but I'm talking about it more broadly.
[Quote] Now this is I think pretty much toe right sentiment, but given that we are unable to set out what that scientific method is quite as clearly as some suppose, and hence that the difficulty in setting out what counts as a conspiracy theory and what doesn't, a bit of humility might be needed.[/quote]
But we could define a "conspiracy theory" using epistemology. But we don't need to, and it could create a red herring - debating both the definition and whether or not it applies in any given case. It's better to just confront a theory directly and demonstrate how the conclusion is unwarranted.
I only brought up conspiracy theories because most of us are aware of what they are, and that there are good reasons to reject them. This was to illustrate the use of an IBE framework to evaluate claims.
[Quote] It won't help to just tell a conspiracy believer that their theory does not match the evidence, because for them it does.[/quote]
One can only point out the reasoning flaws. But it becomes a religion for many of them.
You could give a clear definition of deduction and then persuasively argue that, given the large number of beliefs each person holds, very few of them are arrived at via deduction. But I would say that the same thing holds for inference. If we give a clear definition of inference then we will find that, given the large number of beliefs each person holds, very few of them are arrived at via inference. This includes inference to the best explanation. So as noted earlier, it seems that by "inference to the best explanation" you mean something exceedingly broad and also rather vague.
If we are talking about the practical way that most people arrive at beliefs, then I think the best work on the subject is John Henry Newman's An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, where he develops his "illative sense" among other things. If we are talking about this practical matter, then I don't think deduction or inference or basic beliefs are the right answer, especially in isolation.
But my argument is to point out that this is no longer abduction but the full Peircean reasoning cycle - and so the one that hopes to arrive at the most objective possible answer, given that nothing can be absolutely known and just placed safely enough beyond reasonable doubt.
So if someone has a sketchy conspiratorial IBE, then your offering of further deductive consequences and their checkable facts is what ought to expose the conspiracy and give inductive confirmation for your own preferred interpretation.
However do we expect people to be so rational that they can indeed change their beliefs when confronted by a more organised causal narrative?
Conspiracy theorists are usually invested in some shared community narrative, as in the establishment always lies and so - IBE - must have good reasons for all the cover-ups we see. And the fairly objective truth is that governments and corporations and the elite do routinely lie - even though it may be for good intentions or because it makes their lives simpler.
So if you want to argue a counter-narrative, it has to engage with the conspirators structure of belief on what may be its own well-structured level. A third party might find your IBE to be an argument from political naivety even if your family members IBE is the more sloppily developed and unlikely for what seem like commonsense reasons.
So yes. IBE is how we always have to get the game going. If catshit is found on the carpet, we will jump to the obvious conclusion. The cat did it rather than the CIA or little green men.
But abduction is simply the first step of a properly rational response. To check it out in scientific fashion, we need the pincer movement of constructing a theory - a complete causal model - and then tying that to the inductive confirmation. Adding sufficient correlation to our story about a causation.
Circling back to Hume, this shows that only correlations is the feature and not the bug of pragmatic reasoning. It is not the problem that is defeating our hopes of truth and making everything sociology as our dopey PoMo teaching assistant would have it. Instead, it is the business of making measurements in a way that could even secure the causal model we have deduced.
Measuring the world is an art. Peirce well knew this given that his paid job was setting measurement standards for what became the US National Bureau of Standards.
What can count as a fact is its own kettle of fish. So even correlations are epistemically subjective. On the same level as our causal theories.
Some fool might claim it an objective fact that Australia's highest mountain is Mount Kosciuszko, standing at 2,228 meters above sea level. But who determines even the level of the sea when that is always changing by even meters. And bits are always crumbling off mountains.
So correlations are only as good as the theoretical presumptions being built into the constructions of the facts as in fact some set of logical counterfactuals.
We build the measuring instrument. It is essentially a switch. The switch either flipped or it didnt and now we have our reading. A number on a dial. We can plug that into our probabilistic model and add a sigma confidence interval to properly secure its status as a correlative fact. It can be deemed as true for all practical purposes.
So Hume is always being trotted out. But that is simply a useful point to kick off the tutorial. Most of us have heard it all many times before. Only the teaching assistant seems to never learn from the regular rehearsal of the same old arguments.
It frames a discussion. Have you never encountered a guy who makes some assertion, then says, "prove me wrong"? This establishes an unreachable goalpost. By ackowledging our beliefs are warranted by abduction, a discussion is feasible, and can be productive for both sides. Productive in various ways: undercutting the other guys belief ("proving" him wrong, in an abductive sense); or simply helping both sides to understand the other's point of view - when both positions are defensible.
Quoting Leontiskos
In relation to each other, but based on thorough, valid reasoning and more plausible assumptions, that are least ad hoc. Extreme example: misplacing your car keys vs the keys having been sucked into an interdimensional portal. The latter depends on implausible assumptions.
Quoting Leontiskos
The IDEAL is a true explanation, but since we don't have direct access to truth, it can't be the standard(not directly). Rather, we should apply truth directed approaches: valid reasoning (avoiding contradiction; recognizing entailments), meeting the necessary explanatory scope, considering the plausibility of background assumptions, avoid force fitting data to the hypothesis,...
The process is analogous to being on a jury, charged with weighing evidence to reach a verdict. Your vote is your IBE.
Quoting Leontiskos
Again, we don't have access to the truth. It could very well be that the available evidence supports a false conclusion more than (the unknown) true one. But the evidence is all we have to go on, and (more often than not) it will be true (if we use good, consistent standards)
Quoting Leontiskos
Yes, an IBE presupposes there is a true explanation.
Yes, a single, specific real explanation isn't always possible. A more general explanation may still be possible, or at least some may be ruled out. It can be appropriate to reserve judgement.
That's right. Doesn't that mean that you have to recognize the plausibility of the "conspirator's" narrative? Which is a long way from attempting to "debunk" anything. It seems to me that it actually means putting one's own non-conspiracy narrative at risk. Starting from the belief that the narrative is obviously wrong, is adopting a stance from which it is impossible to do this.
One should also consider whether constructing and presenting an argument may be an ill-advised approach, because it puts the "conspirator" on the defensive, which makes it more difficult for them to recognize the weaknesses and implausibility of their theory. Rationality may be the best guide to truth, but it is not always the best way to persuade people. Recognising and taking into account emotions and biases may be the only effective approach. Sometimes, the best policy is not to engage, but to change the subject.
Quoting Relativist
Perhaps it is necessary to bear in mind that it is possible for two incompatible interpretations of data to be right, or at least not wrong.
Quoting Relativist
Yes. But we seem to prefer to reach a conclusion, even when we don't need to decide. Perhaps we just don't like the uncertainty of indecision.
This is a good approximation, perhaps.
We do make inferences, sure. The question I would bring back to you is that of what makes one inference "the best" among those available. It need not be the case that one inference is the best explanation we have - indeed, it is more common that there are multiple inferences that satisfy the evidence at hand.
And yet we are often obliged to choose. The evidence is insufficient for the choice to be determined, so there are other things at play, including our other beliefs, and the practices we share with those around us. Our epistemic choices are guided by more than evidence; they include the whole form of the life in which we are engaged.
And here Feyerabend's thoughts come in to play. What he shows is that sometimes we infer, not to the best explanation, but to some other explanation - and that this can be a very good thing. You will come across many examples in his book, so I will not list them here.
Now the problem with calling inference to the best explanation, abduction, and listing it alongside deduction and induction, is the air of logical determinism that is given to what is in reality a practice fraught with ambiguity and guesswork. There's a lot going on here that is plainly irrational.
And this brings us back to Hume. His talk of custom and habit reminds us that much of our reasoning isnt strictly rational at all its rooted in the patterns weve come to expect, both individually and collectively. What Hume saw as psychological, Wittgenstein turned into grammar, and Feyerabend showed as scientific practice: we act, speak, and infer within a shared way of life. Causation, explanation, belief all of these belong as much to what we do as to what we think.
I do mean this broadly, and I don't claim that simply being an "IBE" makes it a justifiable belief.
It's reported that Trump has declared Portland Oregon a "war zone". I believe that he did say that. It's been reported in multiple sources, and I saw a video in which he made that statement. I could be wrong: I have not checked the sources, and haven't verified the video wasn't a deepfake. But IMO, the best explanation for the evidence is that he really did say that, despite the fact that the statement itself is implausible. We don't typically think through these things in this detail, but they're implicit in accepting something as fact. So in this case, I'd argue that my belief that Trump made the statement is warranted, despite the fact that it's possibly false. What other basis could there be to claim this is warranted, other than a valid IBE?
By contrast, I heard from one source* that Trump based his "war zone" comment on watching a video of riots in Portland that occurred in 2022. Suppose that's true. He made an IBE, but failed to do any due diligence to validate that what is saw does actually reflect current conditions, so I'd say it's an unwarranted belief on his part.
____
* I'm not fully buying this yet, since it's just one source. So I'm reserving judgement.
Quoting Leontiskos
I found the essay online, and asked Claude (AI) to summarize the chapter on "The Sanction of the Illative Sense". Here's a link to the summary, also pasted below:
[quote=Claude]Main Argument
Newman introduces the concept of the "Illative Sense" - a natural faculty of judgment that allows us to reach certainty in concrete matters where formal logic alone cannot take us. He argues against both extreme skeptics who deny we can have certitude, and rationalists who believe only formal logic can justify beliefs.
Key Points
1. The Nature of the Illative Sense
It's the mind's ability to judge correctly in concrete, real-world matters
Similar to how we exercise judgment in morality (Aristotle's phronesis), aesthetics, or social conduct
Each person must exercise it individually - it's personal, not mechanical
It operates throughout reasoning: at the start (identifying first principles), during arguments (weighing evidence), and at conclusions (determining when proof is sufficient)
2. Why We Need It
Formal logic deals with abstract propositions, but life requires judgments about concrete realities
The gap between probable evidence and certain conclusions can't be bridged by syllogisms alone
We naturally possess certitude about many things despite lacking mathematically rigorous proofs
3. Its Legitimacy
Newman argues we should accept our mental faculties as we find them, just as we accept physical nature
The widespread human capacity for certitude proves it's not a mistake or weakness
God gave us these faculties, and they're adequate for discovering truth when properly used
4. Practical Applications
Newman illustrates how the Illative Sense works in historical inquiry, showing how respected scholars (Niebuhr, Grote, Lewis, etc.) reach different conclusions from the same evidence because they operate from different assumptions, viewpoints, and judgments about what constitutes reasonable interpretation.
Philosophical Significance
Newman is defending common-sense certainty against both radical skepticism and narrow rationalism, arguing that legitimate knowledge requires personal judgment guided by developed intellectual habits, not just formal proofs.[/quote]
Nothing he says conflicts with my claims. He focuses only on deduction, makes vague claims about "common-sense" and asserts that it's fine to accept the product of theses senses. Abduction is consistent with "common sense", but is better positioned for criticism, correction, and debating conflicting views where two individuals' "common sense" leads them to different conclusions. Philosophers of history that came after Newman point to abduction as a key process of historians (see this). Abductive conclusions by historians are sources of debate among them.
But a critical difference is that Newman doesn't discuss warrant - justifying the belief (as far as I can tell). He just assumes the "illiative sense" is reliable.
Exactly.
Quoting Ludwig V
Or unfortunately, any argument won't "compute" as there is not that kind of disciplined structure in the heads of those you might want to argue it out with.
And in general, society is built more on folk not asking the probing questions. Of themselves, let alone others. Religion, culture, politics and economics all want to place their own limits on rational inquiry. There is much that must be taken simply on faith and belief for society to continue to function smoothly in some customary fashion.
Quoting Ludwig V
Which is why forums like PF would have value. There are now so many triggering subjects out there in the general population that it is nice to have the kind of unguarded and non-defensive discussions we have seen in threads such as this.
I jest of course! :smile:
Absolutely, and I've acknowledged this in several posts. Quoting Ludwig V
I agree, but it can still be debated as to whether or not one is warranted (rationally justified) in believing that conclusion.
What I've read, including the paper I've already cited, leads me to think that the term functions in the way offten described by Bernard Wooley in Yes, Minister
Or in our case,
The epistemic issue here is that it's again not just the evidence that is being used, but the background against which that evidence is being evaluated. Things are not so clear cut as they might seem.
Just so.
Thanks for the pointer. Newman and Peirce were saying much the same thing. Peirce developed it more broadly as the mathematical logic introducing his sign of illation that then justified his pragmatic approach to truth.
There is Peirce's On the Algebra of Logic as one reference.
But then I also really like Kauffmann's teasing paper, The Mathematics of Charles Sanders Peirce.
I agree, but when that is the case - we aren't warranted in choosing only one of them. But we would be warranted in excluding those that don't fit the evidence so well.
Quoting Banno
I agree, and I alluded to that when I mentioned the role of our background beliefs. Because they are beliefs, we are treating them a factual (truths) - at least to the extent that the beliefs are categorical (not expressions of certainty). This is perfectly fine most of the time. We should strive for consistency in our beliefs. There are times when we should question our background beliefs, but it's impractical to do so constantly.
Quoting Banno
Like Galileo? Copernicus? As I see it, they are simply dropping the background assumptions of the then-current conventional wisdom, and developing new hypotheses freed of those constraints. I join Feyerabend in applauding that. The question is: how and when should we apply that? I suggest "the how" is in terms of reconsidering certain background beliefs. The "when" is...I don't know, but it can't be constantly. Similarly, scientists DO often operate within the current conventional wisdom of their field, and I expect this is more often than not.
Quoting Banno
Either you're misunderstanding me, or I'm misunderstanding you. But you seem to be inferring that IBE determines an answer, just like deduction does. I don't think that at all (see the first point in this post).
Sure, there's ambiguity and guesswork, and we should be honest about when we are guessing and when there is ambiguity.
I have said an IBE is not necessarily rational. But it can be. Again, I'm discussing belief: my position is that most beliefs are established by IBE, but only a subset of these are warranted beliefs. We often draw conclusions based on irrational reasons. The IBE model provides a framework for discussion between people with different views, a discussion that can expose irrationality on either side.
Or instead, the subjective basis of our cognitive projects is stating the bleeding obvious. We can move swiftly on to the how and the why when it comes to digging ourselves out of this mire.
We are no longer animals as we now reason at a collective social level. But then beyond that everyday manufacturing of consent, we can even transcend "sociology" by cultivating the habits of pragmatic inquiry.
Anglo logicism was of course another story of an early enthusiasm for logic chopping and reductionist metaphysics way over-shooting the mark. It needed a Jesus figure in a flawed Wittgenstein who first sinned and then repented. Sort of was working his way back to pragmatism, but in confused bits and scraps, such was the horror of being caught out again by a totalising enterprise.
Peirce in the paper I just cited set off on the right foot as he began his logical investigations at the level of neurobiology. The new psychological research of his day on how nervous systems form their habits of interpretance. This just was starting from the right place as evolution invented thinking of any kind first.
Good. Then we are agreed that abduction, considered as inference to the "best" explanation, does not determine one explanation, and is not itself a rational process. Do we also agree that as a result it doesn't serve to answer Humes Scepticism?
And yes, I am discussing the use of the term, and so its meaning. What I would bring out is that it is not so easy as some might suppose to set out what is a conspiracy theory and what isn't. That the detail is important.
Or one might accept some doctrine as the ultimate truth, and then save oneself the trouble of thinking by simply lambasting any objections. That works, too.
Interesting. I knew Peirce did something similar but with more formality and precision, so this is a helpful lead.
Do you agree that inference to the best explanation can warrant a belief? This of course is only if it was done rationally.
If so, then explain how this doesn't answer Hume's scepticism.
Quoting Banno
Are there NO easy cases, in your opinion?
Well, I won't disagree, but point out that "the best" remains ill-defined. If we are in agreement as to which explanation is the best, then we should accept it; but here, "the best" might just be "the one we accept"...
Which is to say that we accept the answer based on experience and custom.
So it's not so much answering Hume as agreeing with him.
Quoting Relativist
:blush: Pretty much. Welcome to philosophical analysis.
"The best" is always the one we accept. But if the ensuing belief is warranted, that's all that matters. There's isn't a recipe for warrant.
Isn't "warranted" just another way of saying "best"? If it's best, then it's warranted, and if it is the one warranted move, then it's the best?
Further, both involve an evaluation that is not a deduction.
Following Kant the transcendental subject, through categories (pure concepts of understanding) and their schematism, is the one who imposes the rule of causality, for example, on sensory intuitions. For a sequence of perceptions to become an experience of an object, the "I think" must have unified it according to the necessary rule of cause and effect.
Kant would speak according to the tradition that a belief is true if the judgement formulated by the understanding (through categories) coincides with the sensory intuition that has been previously ordered by the a priori forms of sensibility.
Also Kant rejected the idea that the necessity of natural laws could arise from mere habit. Habit is contingent (it might not exist) and subjective (specific to an individual or species). If science were based on habit, its laws would be mere probabilities, not universal and necessary truths.
So a legitimate belief, according to Kant, is not legitimate if it is based on habit.
That's a very compacted account, yet pretty much spot on. Yep, for us to experience objects and events as structured and intelligible, the transcendental subject applies categories like causality, using the schematism as a bridge, and unifying perceptions under the I think.
Is your aim here to understand Hume, and then to move on to Kant's response? that is, are you after an exegesis, or are you looking for broad answers? It seems to me that you have a pretty good grasp of both Hume and Kant.
What I've been doing is more about relating these ideas to more recent work. So we have Hume showing that what "I" have access to is just impressions. He points out that it seems illegitimate to infer the patterns of causation and so on that make up our world. His answer is somewhat unconvincing - habit and custom. This all woke Kant, who used a transcendental argument to claim that minds are predisposed to join these impressions into those patterns.
In Wittgenstein, those necessary conditions become grammatical rules rather than transcendental structures: not timeless features of mind, but conventions of our shared linguistic practice. In Davidson, the unity of apperception becomes the principle of interpretive coherence: understanding others and the world depends on fitting utterances and actions into a rational, causal, and linguistic web. And in Feyerabend, even that web becomes plural our patterns of causation and justification are practices that can vary across scientific paradigms.
How's that?
No. Being warranted means to be rationally justified.
A subjective "best" inference may, or may not, be warranted.
No. But is an interesting path to follow. My intention is to see how different positions respond to Hume's scepticism.
Quoting Banno
That's very interesting. But you've forgotten to relate it to Hume's scepticism.
We seem to be circling. Being warranted means to be rationally justified, and something is rationally justified if it is warranted. The best explanations are the ones which are rationally justified, and those are the ones that are warranted, and they are the ones we accept. A subjective best inference may not be warranted, but then it would not be the best inference, and so not justified, and not the best.
Help me out of the loop.
Each of those - Kant, Wittgenstein, Feyerabend and Davidson - can be understood as a reply to Hume.
Yes, but choose one of them and explain your answer. I've seen that you like Wittgenstein. So what would Wittgenstein's response to Hume's scepticism be?
All very linguistic. Meanwhile semiotics generalises this to the level of all the codes that are the basis of our interpretative habits. Genetic, neural, linguistic and logical.
Can you explain a little about that in relation to Hume's scepticism? If that's alright.
For Wittgenstein, the demand for justification presupposes a language game, a shared background of practices that already give meaning to evidence, reason, and doubt. To ask, but how do we really know that causes exist? is to try to stand outside all language games to doubt from nowhere. And that, hed say, is nonsensical. If you tried to doubt everything, you would not get as far as doubting anything. So instead of answering Humes scepticism, Wittgenstein dissolves it: the idea that we might need a justification for induction or causation presupposes a context of justification that itself depends on certain unquestioned practices.
In a sense it's the same answer as Hume - it's just what we do.
For Davidson, we make sense of the talk of others by presuming that they are rational and are participating in much the same word as we are. We then have the shared basis of the world in order to make sense of the talk of others. Again, we talk in terns of causes in order to make sense to each other.
That's much the same as the basic semiotic answer, that causation and belief are not primarily out there in the world; they are enacted and intelligible only within structured systems of interaction, whether psychological, linguistic, or semiotic. Apo and I do not differ as much as might be supposed. What Davidson, Wittgenstein, and semiotics all emphasise is that causation and belief are embedded in structured practices psychological habits, language games, or broader semiotic systems. They are not features of the world independently of these practices. In that sense, the difference between Apos semiotic framing and the WittgensteinianDavidsonian account is largely one of emphasis: one highlights codes, the other interpretive and linguistic practices. But both converge on the insight that causal talk is intelligible only within a shared, structured system of interaction.
We could move on to the neuroscience, and talk about how neural nets recognise patterns - a sort of physiological background against which this stuff plays out.
Sure. So semiosis speaks to pragmatic reality modelling at four levels. The construction of a model of the world as it is with us acting in it.
Even the genes are doing that in terms of making and maintaining a body and the metabolism that sustains it. The immune system, digestive system, hormone system, and all the other body systems are run by intelligence. A model of a self in its world. A set of habits of interpretance.
The Humean issue is framed at the level of science rather than sociology. It is about mathematico-logical semiosis rather than linguistic. Numbers rather than words.
It is not really a sociological issue, or even an neurobiological issue, although all levels of semiosis obviously rely on each other in hierarchical fashion. Genes have to do their job well to sustain a body that has the complexity for neurobiology to then add its level of difference. What use is a clever brain until it is in a body with free hands, for example. Or in a body that really needs extra intelligence to model the social world of a social animal.
So any semiotic relation with the world has some version of causation aint correlation. Yet history says evolution has gotten very good at this modelling business. Brains can figure out their environments in practice. If we want to understand the wherefores of epistemology, just see how nature does it.
Humans developed language as a new level of coding and reality modelling. We became socially constructed as members of a tribe, existing in a landscape with an ancestral history. An oral memory and a narrated sense of being selves in world alive with social intricacies.
A new level of semiosis that saw sapiens sweep the Neanderthals aside and colonise the planet. An oral lifestyle that was powered by foraging. One not too concerned with Humean worries about narrations just being narrations. One indeed quite unconcerned as the world seemed animistic - itself part of the collective subjectivity. The trees and the winds all shared our socialised state of mind.
So scepticism is something new that arises when we get to a still higher level of semiosis where the abstract and the concrete creep into the conversation. The idea of objective truth and how it might be secured. The two things we can be certain about because we have a logic to frame the structures that are our general abstractions and a number system to count the concrete particulars or name the material particulars.
Hume voiced a concern that spoke to the transition from a linguistic and sociological level of semiosis to this new rational and scientific level of semiosis. It became important that we were now having to draw a clear line between the subjectivity of our social selves in an oral world and our rational selves in a world demanding objectivity in terms of causal theories and concrete measurements. A strange new world of equations and variables.
Hume became important because he marked this historic crossing point. But once we got used to how this new level of world modelling operated, it soon became a familiar pragmatic habit and Humes worries a moment consigned to the history books.
We are now instead at a moment in epistemological theory where we can look back and see that semiosis - this modelling relation - is so general that it is even the basic theory of life and mind itself.
Fristons Bayesian Brain and free energy principle even dare to put it into a differential equation itself. If your interest truly is in epistemology, it is now testable scientifically theory. Almost to the point of self-caricature.
And if you are still piddling around with Feyerabend, Wittgenstein and Davidson (who he?), then thats so 1960s. Way behind the times.
Here's your error. The "best" in an IBE is not necesarily warranted (rationally justified). It just means it was chosen as "best" because it was subjectively judged to be better than alternatives that were considered.
So an inference to the best explanation is actually an inference to any explanation?
Maybe I misunderstand, but you seem to be implying that humans have the magical power to select the objectively best explanation from the third realm of abstract objects.
Rather, the "best explanation" has been selected subjectively; the subject has judged it to be the "best" explanation from among the ones he's considered. That is not "any" explanation; it is not arbitrary. But it is subjective, and cannot be otherwise.
The subject may, or may not, have been sufficiently rigorous - he may have overlooked facts; he may have not considered the plausibility of the assumptions he's made or that are entailed; he may have jumped to an unjustified biased conclusion....it's just his judgement.
But surely SOME IBEs, that SOME people make are sufficient to warrant a belief. If not, then nobody has much in the way of warranted beliefs, except for some analytic truths. A corrollary of my claim: a belief can be warranted even if it is possibly false.
It is the one that reveals itself in making quick progress. It has that balance between being causally general and empirically verifiable. One can already see how consequences can be deduced and predictions verified.
Any old guess could be a starting point. The null hypothesis indeed would be the gold standard. There is no actual effect as there is no cause. Whatever you think you are seeing, that is an accident. A spurious correlation.
But then a best guess is any guess coherent enough to get the inquiry started. The one to ride until something better comes along. If the guess Is properly constrained by the null hypothesis, then you can call yourself a scientist.
In order to answer Hume's scepticism, abduction would have to show us how to infer the objectively best general conclusion.
We agree that abduction does not do this, but provides only the subjectively best general conclusion.
Hence abduction does not provide and answer to Hume's scepticism, but rather agrees with it.
We could apply a Bayesian calculus to any old guess, and move towards a better guess, sure. That's one possible solution to Hume's scepticism.
Very much along the lines of Davidson.
It was never what was being claimed by Peirce in his critique of Humean induction?
All we have as guide is past experience, and what seems to work. Apart from instinct, it's all any animal has. Science (and not just science) is a vast mostly coherent web of belief and understanding that has evolved out of such practices. The "objectively best" general conclusion is merely the one most consistent and coherent with that general web of established beliefs and understandings. Of course we cannot have deductive certaintythat is what Hume's skepticism is about. That seems obvious today, but needed to be pointed out in the age of rationalism.
It could be "done by valid deduction" if there were such things as certain premises. Seems like "much ado about nothing" today.
Except for arguments whose premises are necessary truths, it is impossible to prove a deductive conclusion is "objectively best". It's an unattainable goal. So why criticize only abductive reasoning for being unable to attain the unattainable?
You could say the deductive conclusion is "objectively best" given the premises, but we could add premises to an abduction that similarly identifies the contingency.
I'm not denying there's a problem of induction:we can't conclude strict impossibility based on a conjunction of evidence. But neither can we conclude a deductive conclusion is a necessary truth, in most cases. This doesn't imply we should all adopt extreme skepticism.
Here's the OP:
Quoting JuanZu
Seems to me that JuanZu is pointing to the prima facie discrepancy between our being confident in a belief based on being "associated with a vivid impression" and a generalisation that is inferred therefrom. I'd understood that as much the same as Popper's basic statements. Hume didn't have a conception of the Duhem-Quine thesis, of course, so took "vivid impressions" as incontrovertible. I don;t see that we could maintain such a thing nowadays.
And so it continues. Appear to be defending representationalism and then slide away into enactivism. Never stick to an argument so as to slither around and leave a little chorus of lost ducklings in your wake.
Thank goodness AI can clarify what was at stake. Banjo never will...
I don't see anyone here suggesting extreme scepticism - including Hume. His point seems to be pretty much the one you are now making.
There is a normative element to deduction, of course, but it is well-bedded, model- theoretical. All that need be accepted is that a predicate is satisfied by the objects of its extension, and that truth is preserved under valid inference. The normative aspect here does not consist in a choice among alternatives, but in adherence to what follows from the model itself.
We cannot justify it by deductive reasoning, but we can by inductive reasoningso the conclusion that the future will resemble the past is not certain, but is the IBE. To put it another way, it is rational in a practical sense to assume that the future will resemble the past, because to our knowledge it always has.
Bayes formalises Peirces approach if you like. We can move on from the nineteenth century.
I still do not understand this. "We can by inductive reasoning" just is "the future will resemble the past". It's re-stating, not explaining.
Added:Quoting Janus
That says that the future resembles the past, because the future resembles the past...?
Valid, I suppose, but I find it unsatisfactory.
:up:
Welcome to the 1960s? Anglophone logic choppers wake up to realise something or other might be slightly amiss. They begin shift in their armchairs and chat among themselves quietly.
If conforming to a model solves the problem, then simply infer a model on the basis of the constant conjunction of the empirical evidence. Under the framework of the model, the (otherwise) inductive inference s necessitated by the model.
I alluded to this earlier.
Sure. The problem that remains is do we aim to eliminate every wrong hypothesis or magically leap to the only correct one? This appears to be how you are framing things.
And clearly, neither is computationally efficient. But Bayesianism is more efficient if there are general priors to rapidly constrain the search space to discover some particular best answer.
It is like the old game of animal, vegetable, mineral. A dichotomising algorithm that can eliminate half the possibilities at each turn will zip through the alternatives at exponential speed.
So the problem is finding the needle in the haystack. But then you can divide the stack in half and stick it through a metal detector. Pretty quick, you arrive at your destination.
Thus we are being asked to believe in some false dilemma. Abduction doesnt have to discover the needle in one inspired leap, nor sift the stack forever. Being organised as a hierarchy of dichotomising constraint gets the job done. And we get to shortcut the process still further by a smart choice of priors. We can already launch into the search from some paradigm that reduces the search space in a generally reliable fashion.
Bayesianism reduces the abductive arc of reason to an algorithm. Something a neural network could do. Once it has been suitably trained on some pragmatic task and formed a hierarchy of weighted priors. And it has some way of learning from its errors.
That is a closing of the loop as a maximisation of self-information via the minimisation of entropic surprise. The rational process that results in a stable sense of self within its generally ignorable world.
So Bayesianism sounds the opposite of abduction. One laboriously eliminates all hypotheses but one. The other supposedly leaps to just the one and ignores all the others.
However, in reality, pragmatism results in a hierarchical organisation of knowledge habits that can parse the world efficiently with built in priors. And also had the feedback loop that is the flip to attentional processing. Pausing to stop and think. Coming to a halt at surprise or error. Learning what needs to learnt to rewrite the hierarchy of priors and move on.
So it is not simply the fact of a Bayesian algorithm. It is the ability to grow an organised hierarchy of priors in a scalefree way. Bayesianism applied over every scale of the challenge that is being a thinking organism within a world that is itself becoming increasingly transformed by that thinking which is taking place. The world as the organism wishes to improve it.
So yes, it closes the loop, because were already inside it. The Bayesian calculus doesnt tell us why we ought to weight one hypothesis over another; it just tells us how to do so consistently, given a prior. The hierarchy of priors you describe isnt an algorithmic miracle its the social, linguistic, and biological history of our talk about causes.
Rationality isnt something we add on top of experience, but what emerges from doing what we do - talking, testing, correcting, and learning together. In that sense, Bayesianism is one more way of describing Humes custom and habit, not a transcendence of it.
So you would use model theory to explain induction? An interesting idea. What do you have in mind? There'd need to be a move from the preservation of truth to a preference between model, I presume?
But then these "customs, habits, and shared practices" are what are left vague. Half-baked. Contingencies treated as obligations.
So I prefer the Bayesianism that is properly biosemiotic. A story about life and mind and why it exists in the way it does within world that is the way it is.
So sure, there is this layer of sociology mediating between the neurobiology and the metaophysical levels of human semiosis. We are socially-constructed by language in a fashion that equips us to create a social level of organismic purpose and function.
Yet that sociology just likes to leave so much out. It doesn't want to root itself in physics the thermodynamic imperative that entrains its structure. It doesn't want to believe in the metaphysics that might draw that essential connection to its attention.
Sociology wants its own little world which is closed off and free just to be itself. Some agreeable collection of priors in the form of "customs, habits, and shared practices". Humans doing their human thing in a pluralist, civilised and non-totalising fashion. The world as it should be for the incurable romantic.
Here you frame my approach as "surely a little too much work; a risk to the easy life of cosy presuppositions that the 'philosopher' would choose to socially-construct". And I agree. Yet also I enjoy the work.
Quoting Banno
Yep. That was my point. Same algorithm repeated at different levels of topological order.
And if sociology is the cosy talk level that self-confirms our status as civilised humans, then that is why I emphasise the need to switch things up to an investigation of causality itself. Not just merely a bit of loose chatter that describes things that have been said rather than targets an explanation of the phenomenon.
You just pointed to a mathematical view of induction as a Bayesian calculus. I then pointed to the issue left hanging the how and the why of the priors. You say that is just sociology. I say descriptively that may be so, but I says we want to cash that out at the mathematical level too. Which is what for instance the Bayesian Brain approach to life and mind is trying to do. The self arising inside the loop as a hierarchy of priors, a hierarchy of Peircean habits of interpretance.
Quoting Banno
Well I've just argued the case for "nope". Yet again.
Of course you will protest that you employ logic too in your armchair approach. But there is a big difference between learning to count and do a little algebra and learning to think in terms of the mathematical architecture that stands behind symmetries and their breaking.
This is the reason Peirce stressed his approach was architectonic. The holism of a systems approach. The logic that gives you the irreducible triad of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.
So yes, rationality can evolve from a linguistic level to a mathematical level. From a social syntax that aims to tell us "who did what to whom" the subject-verb-object structure appropriate for coordinating the behaviour of a band of chatty hominid foragers to a logical and abstract syntax that can organise a metaphysical story of hierarchies composed of their global constraints and their local freedoms.
The way a Cosmos itself self-organises. And the way life and mind could arise within that cosmos by stumbling on the self-making power of biosemiosis.
So of course you will again object to the grandeur of this vision. Wittgenstein fell flat on his face, along with Whitehead and other heroes of the logical atomic age, by trying to be a totaliser. If those dudes couldn't do it, we should as just stop trying.
And yet Peirce had already whipped up a robust logic of reality. And systems science was chipping away in the background. Science and maths really began to catch up after WW2. A theory of complexity could become the new research goal.
Much more is happening every year than you seem to even imagine. You just have to have the itch to get out an explore.
I see a 2 step process: 1) infer elements of a model from induction, based on the conjunction of empirical evidence; 2) cast a specific inference (eg "all swans are white") from this element of a model.
This seems consistent with science. When an innovator proposes a hypothesis at odds with the current conventional wisdom, he is setting aside that conventional model and presenting an element of an alternative model.
Quoting Banno
Ill stick with the patch I can walk on, the language I can play with, the practices I can follow. Thats enough to get things done, and more than enough to keep me honest. Your cathedrals are impressive, but Im happier muddling in the workshop.
I think we are at cross purposes.
But they don't, really- unless you embrace a "relativist" theory of truth.
I don't take it as being "the future will resemble the past", but "the future will most likely resemble the past". This is practical, not "pure" or deductive, reasoning based on what has been experienced in the past as far as we know the future has always resembled the past. We don't know of any exceptions "exceptions" denoting 'breaches of the common set of regularities and invariances'
Quoting Banno
To repeat, I wouldn't put it that way but instead "the future will most likely resemble the past, because the future has, as far as we know, always resembled the past".
.
Note: By "resemble the past" of course I mean broadly speaking. We don't have any reliable records that indicate that there have been periods where such things as gravity failing to obtain, time running backwards, the Sun failing to rise and set, fire freezing things instead of heating and burning them, rivers running backwards, people being suddenly able to breathe underwater, animals changing their forms, people and animals rising from the dead, etc., etc.
Ok. I still don't see that isn't a tautology - or so close as to make no nevermind.
I prefer the past constrains the future. It has already eliminated a huge range of possibilities. That is what makes the future so predictable. But also leaves it full of contingency.
If I ate the cake this morning, I can be sure I wont be eating this evening. Not will anyone else. But if I didnt do so, I could eat it at any future moment. Unless someone else beats me to it. That sort of thing.
Truthmaker theory does this: a truthmaker is that aspect of reality to which a true statement corresponds. Tarski agreed that the statement, "snow is white" is true, because snow is white. This is standard deflation, but he omits identifying the italicized phrase with a truthmaker.
In my earlier post, I was referring to a model of reality. You were referring to a language model. But you can't get truth out of language without a connection to reality- an ontological grounding. So what I said about a model of reality stands, and I'll apply it here:
Quoting Janus
I agree. However, we could draw inferences about the nature of reality by examining the past, and apply that analysis (that model of reality) to making predictions. This is, of course, the nature of physics.
Quoting Banno
I hope you don't mind looping back to this. No doubt you will ignore me if you do.
It is clearly true that "warranted" and "justified" are closely related. But they can be distinguished, at least for philosophical purposes, by locating each in a different approach to argumentation. I'm referring to Stephen Toulmin's Uses of Argument. He treats an argument as a process of justification, and a warrant as a specific part of that process. A warrant, for him, is
But perhaps there is another distinction that can be marked by "warranted" as opposed to "justified".
A prediction is justified by the fact that there's a depression and westerly airstream out in the Atlantic.
The forecaster is warranted in making the prediction because they are qualified to do so.
I am justified in claiming victory because I saw the winning goal being scored.
You are warranted in accepting that because I told you about it.
Some epistemologists use "warrant" to refer to a justification sufficient for knowledge. The conditions that make it so are open to debate. Nevertheless, I was just treating warrant as synonymous with justification.
Well, that just reinforces my opinion that there is no set way to distinguish between them. So your synonymy is not wrong. I'm usually very sceptical about claims of synonymy. There's usually a difference to be found. In this case, perhaps, too many differences for comfort.
I notice that the Wikipedia article on justification mentions warrant as "proper" justification for a belief.
Well, that's just not right. But rather than pursue the issue here, I'm thinking a new thread is needed. I'm thinking of starting a more general chat about one of Gillian Russell's articles on barriers to entailment, so I might leave this for now.
Thanks for the chat here. Let me know what you make of Against Method.
The other is Gillian Russell's recent work on logic, just mentioned. That is about the world rather than about our beliefs.
A valid point - I do tend to use "warrant" and "Justification:" synonymously, which is a problem acknowledged in the literature. We've Plantiga's use of "warrant" for whatever it is that turns a true belief into knowledge, and again that's a whole new kettle of fish.
I'm not sure we have an opposition between warrant and justification so much as the one being a sub-class of the other. We are also justified in believing the forecast of a qualified meteorologist.
Are inductions warranted but not justified?
Yes, and as I said earlier, such examining is all we have to go on, and so it is rational to base our inferences on that observation and its understanding and apply that analysis to making predictions. This is the nature of, not only physics, but science generally. I think this puts to rest the problem of induction.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Janus
It occurred to me when I wrote the above that I am addressing only our ideas (beliefs). I could have written 'invariances' instead of "laws of nature". Do you think it is reasonable to say that if the past constrains the future it follows that nature's invariances do not suddenly or randomly alter?
I'm not familiar with Gillian Russell's work...will check it out.
Came across this...
Quoting Barriers to Entailment by Gillian Russell
Quoting Janus
Yep. So Bayesian Calculus is about belief, but Russell's work is to do with models, and so truth. Looks pretty cool. It is a formalisation of the problem, and the "barrier to entailment" mentioned in the OP.
But I need to get into the detail.
But I wouldn't put that in terms of necessity. Too loaded.
Bayesian calculus deals with our beliefs, such that given some group of beliefs we can calculate their consistency, and put bets on which ones look good. But it doesn't guarantee truth. So what it provides is rational confidence, not metaphysical certainty. It's in line with Hume's scepticism.
I suspect we are emphasising different aspects of the same issues, and that we do not have an actual disagreement. What do you think?
If you are asking me, then invariance is the globally constraining symmetry of the Cosmos. And so what we mean by talking about Natures laws.
And there is evolution of these laws as constraints produce freedoms. And those freedoms can reorganise the general state of those constraints, so producing a new state of cosmic order.
Furthermore, the change is in fact often abrupt. As in the phase transitions of the kind when the temperature or pressure drops, causing steam to turn to water and then ice. A change in topological state from gas to liquid to solod.
The Big Bang was a story of at least five or six such major reorganisations in just its first billionth of a second. Events like inflation, a reheating dump, the Higgs crack, the CP violation phase. All added constraints to the previous physics to lead us towards the world as we now know it.
It took three minutes to get to a state of a hot atomic plasma of electromagnetic radiation. Then 380,000 years for the next major phase change that was the cooling of that plasma - that radiation soup - to the point that it broke into a cosmic microwave background filled with the condensed crud of a gravitating dust of atomic matter. Electromagnetism neutralised and so gravity able to start sweeping the atomic dust into stars and galaxies.
So the laws of nature did evolve through many stages. There was the one prevailing evolutionary logic. The Big Bang was a fireball cooling itself by expanding. But that same cooling-expanding exposed new ways that a suitably cooled and spaced out state of material being could find more complex ways to become thermally organised, As a dissipative structure, it could reorganise itself into richer forms with their ever more detailed or localised laws.
Luckily for the existence of us. As otherwise we wouldnt be here.
And do things persistently in that rich state. At least until the current high water mark of cosmic complexity starts to eat even itself and erode back to the generalised nothingness of a Heat Death void. The ultimate inversion of the Hot Big Bang where it all started,
So the story of the laws of nature is that they started ultimately simple, became interestingly complex, and then eventually are going to degenerate back to the ultimately simple. An ultimate simplicity that is kind of the same, just the dichotomous or inverted form of that initial symmetry. The anthesis to the thesis.
In the end, nothing will be left. But it will also be so eternally everywhere. And its rules will be as simple as possible as by then, possibilty will likewise have become as simple as it can get.
I think that is probably right. I've been watching a lecture by Russell on YouTubefinding it interesting, but there's a lot to wrap my head around.
That's an interesting account that certainly seems to make sense. If we are in the evolutionary middle, so to speak, does it seem plausible to think we in a stable era where the invariances are not likely to suddenly radically change?
I am also interested in semiotics, but having a few other non-philosophical interests and commitments which are important to me, what I really need is more time if I want to gain more than a superficial understanding of these things.
I think you neatly demonstrate the pitfalls of relying on words when doing serious metaphysics - as in here, trying to say something useful about epistemic method without merely restating the bleeding obvious.
Youve just twisted a lot of words to meet your sociological ends. And Im sure you feel that is a watertight verbal construction. There is some chain of entailment that was constructed to close your linguistic sketch.
But oh what a leaky boat. It never left the safe harbour of self-centred idealism. Which would be the only reason it felt like it floats.
You don't actually say anything here about why I'm wrong. That's why I tend not to reply to your posts.
You can't be claiming that Bayesian calculus is not about belief. So, what?
I already pointed out the issue of priors. Others have noted your failure to cash out semantics in stabilising ontic commitments.
Quoting Banno
It is about the openness of beliefs closed under ontic commitment. Best inference constrained by the reality to be encountered at its end.
Your arguments are so sloppy. You point to a SEP page and say see!. You mumble to your class about maybe having to start a new thread on that and then womble off to lunch. Apparently forget that immediately and wander back in chewing on a sandwich.
But anyways. Bayesian reasoning + dissipative structure theory = a biosemiotic model of life and mind. Fristons Bayesian mechanics.
That is what Bayesianism closed under thermodynamics looks like. A world that sets the weights on a minds priors in useful fashion.
You should really try to catch up with where epistemology is at.
Quoting apokrisis
:wink: The grand edifice is tinsel.
Fristons Bayesian mechanics, like any Bayesian scheme, formalises rather than solves Hume's answer to his scepticism.
Friston describes how an adaptive system maintains itself by predicting and minimising surprise, treating say the nervous system as a hierarchical Bayesian network that continually updates its internal model of the world to reduce the gap between expected and actual sensory input. Neurons encode probabilistic beliefs; learning occurs through adjusting these beliefs (priors) to improve future predictions. This formalises pattern recognition as an inferential process: perception and action both serve to confirm or refine the brains generative model.
Relating this to Humes scepticism, Friston doesnt refute it so much as operationalise it. Hume doubted that we can justify inferring the future from the past; Friston shows how organisms predict the future by continuously revising expectations in light of prediction errors. The model gives a pragmatic, mechanistic account of such learning, not a logical justification for it.
Fristons Bayesian mechanics is widely influential but still speculative. Its accepted in the sense that its core idea, the brain as a prediction machine that minimises error, has strong support across neuroscience, psychology, and AI. But the claim that all cognition, life or the universe as a whole can be explained as free energy minimisation is speculative, overly abstract or perhaps even unfalsifiable.
So his ideas are accepted as a powerful framework for modelling cognition and perception but speculative as a general theory of life, the universe and everything.
Adding Pierce and such looks good, but lacks substance.
Now you just need to learn to write honest prompts.
Anyways, as AI replies .
So you forgot the power of recursion.
And also the power of attention. The ability to shift from responding habitually for as long as the future is resembling the past, to attention the moment it no longer does.
So priors can be suppressed and new ones rapidly prototyped by dynamically fixating on some narrowed part of the information space. Letting that spotlit part of the world now be what constrains the systems abductive reasoning.
Brains are very clever in their design. Might be worth focusing on how they actually function for a change,
Something you'd never do...
I'll leave you to it, insults and all.
Quoting apokrisis
:nerd:
Have fun.
Page seven is pretty clear.
"Suppose that claims about the past and the present never entail claims about the future (what we might call Humes 2nd Law.) Is it reasonable to conclude that we are forced to accept that we have intuitive access to future truths, or instead that we can never have justified beliefs with respect to the future? No, in this case it seems much more likely that we have some non-deductive justification."
Not once have I suggested empirical evidence can ENTAIL universal conclusions. I've consistently been discussing BELIEFS. Russell, at least, acknowledges that we can have justified beliefs with respect to the future,despite the fact that these will be justified non-deductively.
Leave it. I'll think about a thread on that article.
I'd really like to see that justification. The problem of course is that any evidence that might be brought forward for the future being like the past must come from the past and must assume - in order to constitute any kind of justification at all - that the future will be like the past.
There really is nothing at all to gainsay that in 5 minutes you or I will awaken to an entirely new reality and laugh at the naive dreaming self that imagined they were a human on a planet doing philosophy online. The dreams of Flying Spaghetti Monsters are notoriously long and complex, just like the tangle of their limbs.
I infer from the success of physics that there exist laws of nature in our world, many of which are (at least) approximated by physics; laws that necessitate the regularities we observe (nomological necessity). Therefore the regularities will necessarily continue into the future.
I suggest there is no better explanation for the success of physics (i.e. it's an IBE), and this is my justification for believing it.
This objection falls away when we consider what a law is, and how we arrive at the hypothesis.
What we observe directly (past and present) is causation between particulars. But we also observe that these token acts of causation follow patterns, such that particulars of a certain type and arrangement have an effect of a certain type. This leads to the hypothesis of what a law is: a causal relation between types that has an effect of a certain type. The causal relation is necessitated by the properties associated with each respective type; time is not a factor in the law, other than with respect to the elapse of time associated with the act of causation.
To suggest that laws (so defined) come and go over time is ad hoc, because there's no evidence for this. Types of particulars may come into or out of existence, but if they exist - the associated laws will necessarily exist.
There is no evidence one way or the other of the future. There is no evidence at all of the future. Not of laws coming or going or remaining the same. One is not more ad hoc than another.
The existence of these laws of nature entail aspects of the future.
The reasoning I'm conveying is not something I made up. It has been presented as a reasonable answer to Hume by some notable philosophers who call themselves "law realists" (e.g. Michael Tooley, Ernest Sosa, David Armstrong, and many who have built upon their work). Tooley and Sosa edited, and contributed to, a book of essays on causation in the book Causation (the link takes you to a PDF of the book).
It's also pretty well accepted physics that the universe has been expanding since the big bang, and will continue to do so on into the future - consistent with general relativity. Someone would have to be explain why this should be rejected as a good means of predicting aspects of both the past and the future.
Quoting Janus
Yep. The growing block universe is a way to see both sides of the story. The fact that the future is free, and so can evolve in unpredicted ways. And yet also the past is what has definitely happened and so removed some vast number of such degrees of freedom. The future is free, and yet also strongly constrained.
So there is truth that the future is open. But also that this openness has become increasingly constrained over time.
What Peirce called the growth of cosmic habit. The Universe as an evolving process where the regularity of natural laws emerges from an initial state of pure chance via the universal metaphysical tendency to form habits.
A rather Bayesian thing. Certainty emerging at the end of the trail of a process of uncertainty constraining or possibility eliminating. But never a terminus of absolute certainty. Only the pragmatic thing of arriving at a reasonable limit on doubt.
But are laws of nature not codifications of observed invariances? That's just what I meant by saying that we know (or have every reason to believe at least) that past futures have resembled past pasts. It's just another way of saying that we have every reason to believe that nature's invariances have not been contravened in the documented past (at least).
I could have also mentioned the huge consistent and coherent body of knowledge and understanding called science, which is all based on the observation and modeling of observed invariances and regularities, as explained in more detail by
But science at least has to cover both bases. It has to be holistic to some degree, even if that is disguised. As in calling the evolved habits of Nature its "laws". Cosmic regularities that simply exist for some reason or other, not because they might have had some Hegelian history of rational evolution.
Perhaps I should consider myself lucky I have a sketchy grounding in formal logic.
Correct. I had a shudder at the mention of Tooley and Sosas Causation. Made me think how lucky I was to have an instinctive aversion to reductionism from as early as I remember. :grin:
No. The hypothesis I discussed is that laws of nature are ontological.
I distinguish laws of nature from so-called "laws of physics". These are, at worst, codifications of these invariances. But they are more than that. when they make predictions that are later confirmed, predictions about things not previously observed. These give us good reasons to think the law of physics may be a true law of nature.
But it still may be they later become falsified by new evidence. This only means the law of physics isn't an accurate description of the ontological law of nature. .
For example, would you say the law of gravity is not merely a codification of the apparent spatiotemporal universality of gravitational effects, but the gravitational effects themselves, along with their mathematically quantifiable attributes?
Isn't that simply because when we find such exceptions, we change the laws?
Yes. Kant's problem as well.
Perhaps that happens sometimes. If there were no regularities, there would be no laws. It doesn't follow from the fact that there are laws that our understanding of them is perfect. Anyway, what I have in mind are the most general regularities such as that fire burns, water flows down hill absent intervention, the Sun rises, organisms grow old and die, wind and water cause erosion, animals need oxygen and water and food to survive, the air is thinner at high altitudes, most objects cannot float in the air and the reason that those which can float is easily understandable, and so on. There are countless examples.
Which is ironic, because we are expected to dogmatically accept Hume's judgement on how the mind works, the exact contours and limits of introspection, and the nature of reflexive knowledge, as well as the causes of the act of understanding/ideas, while those self-same premises preclude Hume's knowing that his theorizing is true. It's very curious.
Consider:
(1) We cannot know causes, only constant conjunction.
(2) We cannot know necessary connections.
(3) All ideas are copies of impressions (essentially, caused by impressions).
(4) Reason is entirely discursive ratio; there is no faculty of intellectus. Reason is not ecstatic, erotic, or unitive. It is wholly instrumental and calculative and also behaviorally inert.
Note that none of these are knowable through constant conjunction and impressions. Hume might appeal to introspection, but why is that reliable given what he's said? More to the point, he is here disagreeing with the vast bulk of prior Western thought, which has a role for contemplative, unitive knowledge (and this role is even larger in Eastern thought). What makes Hume's introspection a source of truth and the sages of past eras' a sort of vapid delusion?
As Étienne Gilson put it: "Hume could only prove that nothing can be known by knowing something he could not prove.
But hang on. Isn't it a methodological presumption in science that when we come across something that doesn't fit our expectations - an exception - that we change our expectations? That is, we modify the theory so as to explain the evidence...
So of corse there are no 'well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws"", as you say... because when they happen, it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear.
So are we to say that "the laws of nature are not merely codifications of natural invariances and their attributes, but are the invariances themselves", while also saying that we can change them to fit the evidence? Hows' that going to work? We change the very invariances of the universe to match the evidence?
Or is it just that what we say about stuff that happens is different to the stuff that happens, and it's better if we try to match what we say to what happens?
Indeed. And if laws are constraints, then the regularities can be statistical. Exceptions get to prove the general rule.
You arrive at the Peircean view where laws need a natural explanation. We want to avoid arriving at some transcendent power that lays down arbitrary rules. Instead we want laws to emerge in terms of being the constraints that cannot help but become the case even when facing the most lawless situations. The cosmic habits which maximise the symmetry of the world to the degree that it pragmatically matters.
So exceptions can exist to the degree they are differences not in fact making a difference. A law or constraint only has to achieve that. And indeed has no need to go any further. Statistical regularity is quite enough for Nature.
Quoting Banno
Completely arse backwards once more.
Talk of laws is closet theism. How can laws exist without their law-enforcer? Constraints on the other hand cant help but emerge out of the free play of interactions. Exceptions at the local scale become the regularities at the global scale,
When individual difference is collectively averaged, it has to fall into some natural pattern. A dynamical equilibrium.
Even chaos is such a pattern. A powerlaw ensemble of fluctuations. The universalised growth of randomness.
Science only needs to change its framing of some law if the exceptions are deemed significant for some reason. But the null hypothesis exists because regularity must always come with its grain of irregularity.
The perfect circle could conceivably exist, but could it ever be in practice drawn? What inscribing process could be so perfectly constrained that it had literally zero fluctuations?
A circle drawn to be good enough for all practical purposes will do perfectly well.
Perhaps.
In any case, you don't say why my "it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear" is arse backwards. Change "law" to "theory" if that suits your need to be rid of god, I won't object. So your claim is what - that we ought change the evidence to match the theory? Surely not.
Mumbling about patterns doesn't much cut it. The trouble perhaps is, like Dogberry, you are to clever to be understood. So we'll never know.
By we, you mean you. You cant admit in public to your errors of thought. And so you must thus construct a world in which I am in the wrong for most likely being right.
If you could poke a hole in my reasoning, you would leap at it. Instead you must feign a moral victory in the pose: Well who could ever understand this guy anyway. Am I right guys? Hey, am I right!.
Impression management. Something else I find perpetually amusing even though I should be getting on with more useful things. :wink:
More about me. What fun!
In order to address your argument, it would have to be clearly expressed. You have done so in other threads, and I've addressed it. But here - it's a mess. The bits that make sense I pretty much agree with. The rest, when you try to set it out, collapses under it's own weight. That's the problem with tinsel as a construction medium.
But now we have even more certainty, from Tim. In his reply to @unenlightened, that Hume claimed we cannot know anything...
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Of course Hume would agree, if not in those terms - he understands that his own philosophy is based in the same empirical and psychological habits it describes. He's not offering a proof of scepticism, he's mapping out, with humility, what can be deduced and what cannot.
Whatever happened to the principle of charity I wonder?
So just the usual game of duck and dodge. :up:
I'm here. Offer a clear critique, and I will reply.
Just to be clear, here's my opine on the abductive response to the OP, as stated:
Quoting Banno
I stand by it. And I don't think anyone here has presented a clear enough account of abduction to give me pause.
:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:
Peirce developed on Hume's scepticism, as did Popper, Feyerabend, and any one else with an empirical leaning. They didn't reject Hume, so much as have a go at explaining how we do make scientific progress despite the difficulties Hume noted. Peirce's contribution is noteworthy, but far from central, and certainly not the Grand Cathedral you pretend to.
Your approach is preaching rather than thinking, a gran lie with a few bits of truth thrown in to keep the masses confused.
Abduction doesnt define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic.
Strawman. It is a necessary part of a logic of science. The bit that gets the game of deduction and inductive confirmation started.
You seem to be very confused about this issue. But then you seem to exist in some world where logic is only a mathematical exercise rather than a pragmatic enterprise. The psychology is rather the point.
Simpler to cut, paste and trim SEP for you .
...is what folk claim when they don't have a reply.
Odd of you to quote back to me from an article that supports the view I just set out. If there was a point, you dropped it somewhere. If there is something you think relevant in that block of text, set it out.
Here's a bit you left out:
Have a look at the article on Abduction, as well, for a slightly wider field of view - it might help you come to terms with what is going on here.
Nope. Even if you feel Peirces account to be inadequate, you have to offer something better or theres nothing to discuss.
So keep on ducking and dodging. Or step up for once. How else is a hypothesis to be formed except that it seems to be a thought that strikes the mark?
Something catches the attention as it seems to suggest a causal connection. One has reason to suspect a general principle lurks. It is worth shaping up in systematic fashion through deducing the consequences of such an explanation and then seeking the evidence that would offer inductive support. Or abduction as inference to the best explanation.
If you have some sharper story of how explanations originate and come to be believed, speak up. Don't be shy. Otherwise ya got nuthin, as you say.
Quoting Banno
What can or cannot be deduced, given the opening books of the Treaties are taken as true and infallible, as Hume himself takes them. He refers to his description of how the mind works and interacts with the world as a "proofs" throughout the later parts of the book to justify his theses. Again, why is Hume's introspection here absolute, and almost all prior thinkers' introspection mere delusion, and why is it "humility" for Hume to have assumed this is so?
How is simply asserting things as true, despite the fact that these very assertions imply that you cannot possibly know the truth of what you are saying, "humility" and not the very height of dogmatism?
It's interesting how emotively the rationalists defend. I agree with both here. It is the necessary bit of the game that gets induction started. But it ain't logical, and it ain't evidential. It's a leap of faith. Nothing wrong with that - it serves us well so far and perhaps for the foreseeable. It's just that it is not "rational". It's necessary to the project and it seems to work so far. If it stops working we'll have to think again.
Quoting apokrisis
That's what Hume called it too - "habit". But he located it firmly in human memory. I would have thought that the cosmos would display something more like inertia, but regardless of what one calls it, there is no evidence of it from the future, and the move from past to future, or from explanation to prediction, remains unsupported by any logic or evidence.
Quoting apokrisis
I replied:
Quoting Banno
If you wanted to use your own answer, why bother asking the question...? You are choosing to carve a very human process so that it fits your pet theory, by choosing a starting point. You are the one playing games. Consider:
Quoting apokrisis
Yes! Again, we are not disagreeing with what's been said; I'm just pointing out that this is not logic. Quoting Banno
You already have your causal relation, before you start on the logic of checking it. You bring it in to confirm your bias. That's the criticism.
Quoting unenlightened
:grin: As do I! Abduction is not a formalisable process that can provide an algorithmic answer to Hume's scepticism.
You've badly misunderstood Hume.
I don't, I just think Hume's conclusions are reductio ad absurdum against empiricism, while famously, the dogma also isn't supportable by its own epistemic standards, in which case it isn't "humility" it's dogmatism. Just because an asserted dogma leads to skepticism and materialism doesn't make it "humility."
You seem to miss the bit where Hume is talking about the psychology of knowing, not the logic - having shown that the logic isn't of any use in justifying an induction.
Nah. We are talking science here. You have to sound reasonable when you make your grant application. You have to offer a causal explanation that would be worth testing. Or at least you have to be owed a favour by someone dishing out the dosh.
Quoting unenlightened
Sounds like hopeful twaddle.
So Hume's premises should be accepted over others because he is "doing psychology?" And it's not problematic that they are self-undermining because its "psychology?"
But surely past thinkers were just as much engaged in a psychology of knowing, so why are they all to be dismissed and Hume to be accepted on sheer assertion?
Not at all. We know induction is invalid. Hume presents an empirical answer, not a logical one. If you have a better, present it for consideration. We might apply a bayesian calculus to choose between the options...
You seemed to want to safely distance yourself from that. OK. So what do you deduce from the unexpected? How is the sudden need for an explanation also the idea of an explanation? When are you going to start saying something sensible here rather than posturing?
Quoting Banno
But then
Quoting apokrisis
Note the move involved. From the particular to the general and from the general back to the particular. The surprise, the principle, the prediction. If you can get back out what you first put in, youre in good shape.
So you simply reply in bad faith. Its all youve got. Lame and performative efforts to pretend you are waving and not drowning.
Quoting Banno
Tediously you again skip over the deduction that fleshes out the move from the particular to the general.
If first comes the particular surprise as you argue, then has to come its general explanation. After that you have something to test.
And how is it confirming a bias? It is seeking to confirm the general explanation of the particular surprise. The confirmation comes then in the form of narrowing the scope for doubt, not for actually asserting complete faith in some prior hazy belief.
It is like you havent even been introduced to science as a method. You come up with the whackiest claims.
Quoting Banno
To go from the particular to the general isnt that hard to understand surely? Why else is fundamental physics all about seeking the symmetries that explain Nature? If symmetry is getting broken, then what is the symmetry is the sensible question. What is the general ground to the particular event? What is the wider principle that would make some unexpected event a matter of course? Its all pretty bleeding simple.
You are making such a fool of yourself with your strained efforts to deny the obvious. But why stop now that you are on a roll? :up:
Deduce? Nothing - that's the point!
Quoting apokrisis
Soon after you start listening.
Good night.
Who gives a fuck about validity. Pragmatism is about being happy that reasoning can be useful. What matters is defining reason in a reasonable fashion. Mathematics might want proof. But then where does its axioms come from? What is the psychological process that grounds them? When does all the specious bullshit stop?
Is that a law of nature? I think it's the advice of a propagandist. Scream softly or the children might hear.
That explains quite a bit.
Look at the big sook. Not one reply to any point I have made. Just the usual posturing and deflection.
I appreciate your effort. But as a zinger, its a complete fail. Take some pride in your work if you want to wound.
Zing!!!!
I don't want to wound at all, and I'm not applying for a grant. I'm not even remotely saying anything original to take pride in. I'm interested in the attempt to defeat Hume, who I see as one of the great defenders of the nascent science, in the name of a false and contrived rationalism. I think it is a great pity and a disservice to science and to humanity. Science is not a religion; it makes no eternal pronouncements but remains humble, provisional, seeking understanding not overseeing. So maybe cut out the bullying posture a bit; it's unscientific.
While @Banno can be as annoying as you to try to have a conversation with, in this he speaks for me as well. You are obscure Apo. It took me ages to decode from your posts your view of consciousness, which turns out to be a fairly straightforward reductive functionalism. Presumably obscurity is your intent, or you wouldn't speak the way you do. You decline interrogation (unless sympathetic), which is your prerogative of course. You say interesting stuff sometimes, but it's hard going to ask questions to get it clarified. Which is what philosophers like to do. @Banno is hard going as well, and slides away. @180 Proof, like you, relatively quickly moves to insult and condescension, although perhaps less so now. Everyone else submits pretty much, except for some of the crazy ones who get banned.
Quoting apokrisis
with
Quoting unenlightened
So forgive me if that came across as unhelpful twaddle. What did you really mean to say and do you think it was a helpful contribution?
Or is it that the pool has its shallow end yet also its deep end. Then even its paddling pool.
If I am obscure then you are ?
Cheers. If there is something in particular that I ought follow up on, let me know.
I'm thinking of laws as being descriptions of observed regularities. Then there are theories which purport to explain the ways in which those regularities function and their relation to other regularities. So we don't have well-documented cases of the most general natural invariances failing to obtain.
You seem to be talking about the theory side. So, for example, we had the Newtonian understanding of gravity and then the Einsteinian understanding, but the observed effects of gravity didn't change or ever fail to obtain as far as we know.
Quoting Banno
So, in line with what I wrote above, you seem to be talking about what I'm not talking about. We can have two meanings of "the laws of nature"one sees them as being conceptual codifications of the observed invariances and the other sees them as the invariances themselves. One doesn't have to be right and the other wrongthey are merely two different ways of thinking about it.
Quoting Banno
Right, what we say about things is not the things themselves, and we should try to match what we say with what happens.
Quoting apokrisis
The regularities seem rigid on the macro-scaleand that is the macro-manifestation of the statistical averages operating on the micro-scale? That seems to make sense.
Quoting apokrisis
Right, I'm more sympathetic to the idea that nature's regularities have evolved like habits than that they are given as eternal verities by some imagined lawgiver.
We are going with your suggestion that the unexpected starts the game. And so the question is how does a line of thought logically unfold from there if you are a rational inquirer into Nature of the kind that we would regard as conforming to the pragmatic epistemology of a scientist?
I replied, that being struck by some particular fact, we would look to its general explanation. And that is how Peirce sets up IBE. The logical move is to think that the exceptional exists within the greater context of the universal. And so we isolate the particular and look for how it might fit into some larger generality.
If something is merely "unexpected", then this could be the kind of accident that generally happens. The avalanche slides, the beam buckles. It could be something that should have happened but didn't. The lift arrives but its door doesn't open, the house was burgled and yet the dog didn't bark. It could be that shit was shoved through your letterbox and you want to find out who did it.
So there are events we immediately and habitually interpret as being in the class of mere accidents or failures of normal prediction. Generalities of those kinds. Or there are events which suddenly seem untoward paradigm breaking because they don't immediately assimilate to your regular structure of belief.
"Shit through my letterbox? But I'm such a nice guy! Widely admired. Was it some unlikely accident? Does this kind of thing just have to be expected as a general fact of the neighbourhood? Am I in fact not so popular as I thought?" [Hurriedly rejects the last paradigm shifting notion as just too ugly to even investigate further.]
So you can see how the abductive step goes. Casting around in a general fashion. Accidents can explain things as one extreme of how particulars are caused, then intention or lawful necessity can get the credit at the other end of this causal dichotomy. The idea of generality itself developed with the logical structure of the symmetry-breaking dichotomy.
The exciting thing would be dimissing mere accident, rejecting also a known general cause, and so having to figure out something new. The stage of thought we are labelling abduction is already passing from its the level of a habitual classification of the unexpected event to now the attentional level of feeling the need to inquire more closely. We have to actually wheel out the epistemic method that secured those previous classification skills as ingrained IBE and get prepared to work this one out at the level of fully attentive and rationally structured inquiry.
Friston's Bayesian brain, in other words. Embodied cognition. Peircean semiosis. All the models of cognition as having the structure where IBE becomes the sedimentary layers formed by a lifetime of learning how best to understand the world as it exists for "us" at its centre. You build up the wisdom of habits, and then keep on adding to that store of what works for you in the same manner.
The logic of the reasoning arc is the same. But a habit is just your many particular experiences of the world suitably generalised to the point they feel automatic. Attention is what you wheel in when you need to take a little more time to figure out a proper fit to a known generalisation, or even to begin adding some new habit of interpretance as a useful addition to the sedimented layers.
If you are truly flexible of mind and rigorous of thought, you might even be able to unravel old established thought patterns. Dissolve some sedimentary layers that may seem so deeply embedded that they have become undoubtable, but now you see they are habits that were wrong. Or just not general enough to continue to take up so much space in your head.
So there we have the complex but quite logical structure of abduction. The structure that evolution itself has already discovered and which organises every brain or cognitive enterprise. The unexpected arises. And it immediately is recognised as significant in some fashion as it doesn't seem to answer to the logical dichotomy of chance~necessity. It fits neither with your notions of mere chance, nor known regularity. IBE at the first habit level of response glitches. You must pause and reason it out in a more positively inquisitive fashion.
The IBE logic of habitual response becomes now the IBE logic of the attentional response. You cast around. If not mere accident, nor known regularity, then what? We have discarded whole categories of experience and narrowed the scope of our thoughts to see this unexpected particular as in fact the clue to some deeper mystery. And what do we do when we are Sherlock Holmes? Deduce consequences and seek inductive confirmation.
Take the particular, identify its generality, generate the prediction that would best test this new rule. The ability to now predict the particular from its general rule is all the proof you will ever need, or could ever get, that you are right in your thinking. Congrats. You have a new thought habit thanks to the logic of IBE. You can dichotomise or symmetry-break any event you come across as an example of a know regularity. Or the other thing of a difference that doesn't make a difference to you. Just an accident to be dismissed as such.
That is a summary of a thesis that should after so many years be quite familiar to your ears. But your ears don't listen. Your brain doesn't engage. Your spidey senses just flash red alert. Danger, danger, Will Smith! Our impression management shield is failing! Slide away fast pretending you made an argument that was a celebrated success and lunch now calls you to your real world duties. :up:
When you face a lumpen realist, there is no harm in shaking up their presuppositions with a dose of what seems like idealism.
The lumpen realist has to be the closet idealist anyway. They are the ones who believe in "the laws of nature" as sacrosanct verities. Truths spoken by ... well someone in the position to know.
Showing that it is alright to psychologise nature by talk of sedimentary habit and the evolutionary cosmos might help them one day to come out of the closet of their own accord. Let a little happy diversity into their shuttered lives. :grin:
Sorry, missed this. Because laws are descriptive and don't really explain anything. Intention is explanatory. Although this might still be vulnerable to @unenlightened's defence of Hume, I'm not sure.
That is not the view of law realists. They suggests there to be an ontological basis for the observed regularities.
Example: two objects with opposite electric charge (e.g. electron & proton) have a force of attraction between them. This force is a necessary consequence of their properties. The properties and force are ontological.
Yes, I suppose so. So how to proceed. I suspect that, as with most of these sorts of problems, it's as much about the choice of wording as the way things are. We agree that there are regularities, and that "what we say about things is not the things themselves, and we should try to match what we say with what happens".
I'm interested in the move from what Apo calls "the specific to the general". And I take this to be the focus of Hume's scepticism. Incidentally, that word, "scepticism", seems to frighten some folk (@Count Timothy von Icarus), as if Hume were showing that science can't work - quite the opposite, as @unenlightened points out. Better, Hume takes science as granted, and looks to see how it might work; finds that it can't be based on a logical deduction, and looks for an alternative.
Since it was questioned, let's go over the logic of induction again. Apo said Quoting apokrisis
But yes, that is exactly the problem. The move from any finite sequence of specific statements to a general statement is invalid. More formally, from f(a), f(b), f(c)... we cannot deduce U(x)f(x). This is the "scandal of induction". It is a philosophical problem - scientists and engineers just move on without paying it much attention. But it is part of the plumbing of our understanding of the world, and will niggle at those who worry about such things.
And Hume's response is much the same as that of the scientists and engineers mentioned above - just move on. He talked of moving on as a "habit". Since his time others came up with other suggestions. Most famously, perhaps, is falsification, a very clever response. Instead of proving that U(x)f(x), why not assume it and look for a counter-instance - and x that is not f? We can't prove an universal, but we can disprove it... or so Popper supposed. There are problems there, too, of course.
Now all of this is the standard history of the philosophy of science - regardless of what some here think. The scandal of induction has been the central problem for philosophy of science. Check me on this, if you like. There is a distinct eccentricity in suggesting otherwise, presumably a consequence of a desire to highlight the role or Pierce. Quite specifically, neither Pierce's version of abduction, nor the more recent variations, have satisfactorily answered Hume. And by "satisfactorily" here I mean that it has not gained any general acceptance as a way around the scandal. See the SEP articles for more on this. Point is, I'm right about it. Where the answer sits at present is more in Bayesian Calculus, which accepts Hume's point, and instead of looking to justify our scientific theories as true, looks to choose which ones are most believable.
That is the topic of this discussion, so far as I can see.
Now I don't think you and I, and even Apo and I, are really very far from agreement on this. It is, after all, what happened. But the narcissism of small differences keeps the posts... interesting.
The acrimony is a shame, but Apo and I have butted heads since before this forum came about. He's convinced by a form of pragmatism that I find wanting, and as is my want, I like to point out the problems with such things.
By the way, since it is a concern of yours, I did prepare this post using AI. I fed paragraphs in, read the response and then edited the text so as to account for issue identified by the AI. Some of the wording was changed as a result, I think for the better, or I wouldn't have made the change. It perhaps also helped in setting a less aggressive tone than i might otherwise have chosen. I believe this is well within the guidelines of the forum. If you don't like that, you do not have to read my posts.
And what prevents deduction moving from the general to the particular? Or induction moving from the particular to the general? And so the pincer movement on truth as the pragmatism that I describe?
I think when you talk about plumbing, you mean digging another long drop. And mistaking philosophy for applied predicate logic and set theory is like trying to do the Highland fling on one leg.
And oddly, set theory claimed to reach the infinite whereas Peirce preached finitude. Thats what hopping around on one leg gets you. Abstract nonsense.
Quoting Banno
Hence the useful dichotomisation of nature into chance and necessity. The set of all the accidents and the set of all the lawful regularities. And the statistical rules for inferring which of these sets is most likely the one you have just pulled that unexpected particular from.
Do we falsify the belief or challenge the doubt? It all winds up back at the same place. Reason bounded by its dichotomous logic. The truth balanced between particularity and generality. Deduction and induction able to do their complementary thing as they have been set up dialectically as each others inverse operation.
Quoting Banno
Yeah. Im sure Hume was an exam question back in Epistemology 101. Its own important moment in Enlightenment history. One really ought to give the 15 minutes of fame it deserves.
But to elevate it to the Gospel of St Hume? A bit much.
Quoting Banno
So you mean Im right. You just nicked my punchline. And left off the dichotomy. The bit that continues on to say the theories that are the most believable because they are also the least doubtable. :lol:
We have the pragmatist pincer movement that places us somewhere actually measurable on a spectrum. Some place that a sigma confidence can be assigned, the null hypothesis ranked against. Between doubt and belief, we can land in some justified Bayesian spot.
Abduction, on the other hand, concerns how hypotheses arise. Its more about possibilities, not their justification. So, it belongs to the context of discovery, not the context of justification. Abduction is pre-epistemic, it produces candidates for knowledge but doesnt by itself confer warrant. Its how we start to think, not how we come to know.
I wonder if it is possible to change approaches, to move from psychology to geometry (and physics). Considering that in Kant, for example, the extensiveness of space (a discrete space) as pure intuition is a condition of possibility for objects of experience, this may create a bridge in this change of approaches.
Why take regularity as something given and without genesis? If regularity is an EFFECT, this would completely change the issue of the laws of nature and their origin. Since, and this is not casuality, these laws are also presented as something given and without origin.
AI response:
[Quote]regularities appear naturally in discrete spaces. In fact, discrete spaces are often studied specifically to analyze and understand these regular patterns. The field of discrete mathematics, which includes areas like combinatorics and graph theory, is built on the foundation of studying such structures and the rules that govern them. [/Quote]
This is so interesting.
If we follow Hume, our best theories of physics function because our habits are such as to recognise patterns in the stuff around us, but that we are not justified (or warranted) deductively in recognising those patterns. Induction is a habit, not a justification. No further explanation is given for the fact of that regularity.
If I follow your suggestion, which is somewhat like Apo's, the geometry of space is such that gives rise to the patterns we see. So what is recognised through habit is a result of the structure of space. (Is that right?).
Now here's the potential circularity: we understand the geometry of space because we recognise the patterns. Our understanding of geometry is derived from our recognition of those patterns. We would have geometry explaining the patterns only because those patterns justify geometry.
A response might be - will be - that geometry is not justified by those patterns we find around us, but the condition that makes such patterns recognisable - regularities as the necessary consequence of how experience is structured.
But I'd suggest that this might amounts to saying little more than Hume already said - that there are patterns. I don't see how "constraints on what patterns are possible" is a great change from Hume. He acknowledge that not just any pattern would do, after all. That there is some constraint is one thing; that there is this particular constraint, quite another. Explaining that there must be some constraint is not explaining why there must be this particular constraint.
Putting it another way, perhaps more in line with Wittgenstein, any explanation must have a grounding, something that is taken as granted and against which the explanation takes place.
In any case, Apo will be able to fill you in on more along these lines lines, if you can make sense of it. I remain unconvinced; not that there is not something interesting to be said here, but that it works as a reply to Hume's scepticism and the stuff thereafter.
But wouldn't that be an anthropocentric position? Hume tells us that there are habits and regularities, but he does not tell us the nature of those. This is where we stop doing psychology, and perhaps the issue can be approached from another point of view.
For me, there is a realism in Hume that is the realism of habits and human nature, which serves as the basis for him to say something about induction and deduction. In other words, his knowledge of human nature is the ground on which he bases his criticism. This realism would play against him: he is talking about the nature of something, in this case the nature of man as a creature of habits. And in that sense, his position cannot take precedence over a geometric-physical description. In fact, here the geometric-physical description takes precedence, as it is capable of asking why the regularities are presented to us as they are.
In short, anthropology weighs too heavily on Hume. Which is a realistic description of human nature. But being realistic, he can no longer deny the validity of other realistic descriptions that go even further and can explain the nature of regularities. Hume cannot be absolutely sceptical. And what consequences does this have for the problem of induction? That is not yet clear to me. I need to think about it more. But perhaps the problem of induction is simply an anthropological problem.
And here Kant comes in with his discrete space and time. They are the condition of possibility of experience and therefore of the recognition of regularities. I find a relationship between this and differential geometry that allows us to understand extensive and discrete space as originating from continuous spaces. And from here, everything that follows in physics revolves around the origin of the regularity of the laws of nature, and ultimately the origin of the laws themselves. Discretisation is a process that goes from the continuous to the discrete (quantisation, quantum mechanics) and much more...
Sure, that is a possibility. But it raises a lot of questions about the details of this objective, but invisible and all-powerful, existence that laws partake of. Are the laws all omnipresent? If so, how does that fit with them being numerically distinct? Or is there really one big law that explains everything? Do laws change? Eternal god(s) without the personality?
I feel a bit bad now. I was remembering conversations on the philosophy of mind. Your awareness of academic philosophy is valuable and noticed.
Hume is deeply uninteresting. He says something obvious about cognition. It is modelling. And now we can move along swiftly.
Peirce gets us back to ontology. His exciting idea is that epistemology and ontology both have the same essential causal self organising structure. Mind is of course modelling and the Cosmos is the physical reality. But still. The metaphysical level logic is the same in important ways. And it has to be so as that is the only way self organisation can take place.
So bang on about Hume all you like. Peirce already fixed up science as a rational method. Epistemology is sorted. Move on.
But what about this crazy idea that the Cosmos is an evolutionary process of taking habits? A growth of rational structure. Something that begins as a vague everythingness and then develops with a systems logic of downward acting constraints and upward constructing degrees of freedom. A whole complex metaphysics of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness. Or potentiality, actuality and necessity. The irreducibility of the triadic relation.
You have this whole story laid out. One that was there at the start of philosophy with Anaximander and continues to bob about in the background through Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Aristotle and Plato. Then reappears with German Naturphilosphie - though mixed up with Christian theology and the wishful thinking of the Romantics. And finally we get science and maths really along for the ride as systems science and complexity theory fire up.
So Peirce was there at the right moment in history to set out a basic template of self-organisation as a general logic. A logic of both epistemic systems and ontological systems. He gave the reason for why we would have brains that echo the logic of the world. A system is a system is a system. And that is what we need to get to the bottom of.
Of course, this is all rather complicated and demanding. Unfamiliar and scary. Who even needs it if our only pragmatic interests are in building better machines. Reductionism gives you mechanics. You get engineering and computing. Systems are about holism and self organisation. We can pretend that more complex engineering and computing will get us to that too.
But anyways. That is my puzzle. There is this big exciting stuff to sink your teeth into. And science is already eating philosophys lunch. Even a modest metaphysical hit like Ontic Structural Realism is only really catching up to 1960s quantum field theory.
Yet maybe that is how it should be. Philosophy doesnt even seem very good at teaching critical thinking anymore. Maybe it just is now a curatorial exercise. The museum of old ideas. In this room we have Hume. In another we have a dusty old crew that includes the Austins, Collingwoods and Davidsons. No one hardly visits that anymore. The exotic Continentals are more the crowd pleasers.
So rehash Hume for an umpteenth time. The interesting thing about abduction is that it does have its logical structure even if you want to draw a line between hypothesis discovery and theory development. There is the sudden aha! The leap from the particular to the general. The reframing that reveals a fact in a new light. The thing Peirce was getting at in how he set up IBE.
The surprising fact, C, is observed. But if A were true, C would be a matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.
If the world is generally this way as a system of constraints, then the kind of regularities it would generate - the kind of fluctuations or degrees of freedom it would result in - would have this particular character as a matter of course. Guess the correct rule and you will get the kind of variables it must have to be able to operate.
Quoting JuanZu
This is just what Im talking about. Why are electrons and photons the way they are? Well the answer just jumps out once you can understand gauge symmetry. This is the marvel of gauge applied to Maxwells equations of electromagnetism. The fact that U(1) is the simplest complex number Lie group simply demands that reality has electric charge and the massless vector boson we call the photon.
So the holism of quantum field theory says the excitations of Nature must be shaped by fundamental symmetries. And the abductive hoops that science went through to sort out the Standard Model of particle physics are entertaining to read. All the maths of gauge groups was known. So the small library of possible symmetries was known in the same way Plato could know that regular solids could even exist. But fitting the particles popping out of the colliders into the right slots took all sorts wrong turns. Protons and neutrons turned out to be SU(3) - and so were triplets of quarks. The weak force had to have previously been the SU(2) electroweak force and then broken by a matching SU(2) scalar field - the Higgs - to be turned into a force now with massive particles and also reorganised to release the U(1) photon which had been effectively caged inside it.
It is like the world could only be composed of atoms that were spheres, cubes, tetrahedrons, and the other Platonic solids. But here we are now stripping geometry down to algebra and so allowing the maths to range over all the normed division algebras. No longer just the reals, but the complex numbers that embed quantum spin in every fundamental particle, and the quaternions that are especially useful to understanding the half-spin fermions.
So abduction in particle physics became about a small library of Platonic structures that existed because they had irreducible symmetry. And then firing up the collider to look for the tell tale particles that these symmetries would have to produce in their various combinations.
There were the surprises, like the nine kinds of mesons produced in hot collisions. That made sense when it clicked that mesons were actually short lived quark-antiquark pairs. The SU(3) symmetry that gave three colours of the quarks also gave the nine possible pairings of quarks - eight charged and the ninth neutral. The physical reality just drops out of the symmetries that constrain the possible structures of nature, The big deal that Ontic Structural Realism was all about.
So reality had this systems logic. Reality had to be classical because you have real number matrices describing the Poincare symmetry group of special relativity. And it had to be quantum because you have the complex numbers matrices of the gauge theory underpinning quantum field theory. If these number systems could exist as themselves algebraic symmetries, then nature had to express them as the forms its excitations took. Even the classical vs quantum divide boils down to the restrictions that mathematical logic creates for itself.
So Peirce proposed a deep connection between the self-organising mind and a self-organising universe. This led to his triadic logic, his tale of irreducibly hierarchical systems order. Forget the reductionist logic used for deduction and other mechanistic tales of causal entailment. Peirce was on to something way more fun. A logic large enough to forge a world.
And now science really has a sense of what it is looking for. Mathematical strength models of symmetry coupled to colliders or any other instrument which could manifest the particle that must exist as some combination of broken symmetries at a given temperature of the Universe.
Yes again, it is not the deductive logic with its valid arguments that seem so important to some frittering their time away in the margins of philosophy. It is the grand vision Peirce had of a notion or the logical or the rational that could be a theory of everything. A theory of the self organising system, whether that system was epistemic or ontic. Whether it was psychology or physics, mind or matter.
So stuff Hume. Stuff weedy complaints about abduction being an invalid logic, and possibly not even a logic. It is all so trivial. Useful in small ways. But also builds in habits of thought that actively prevent understanding logic as a metaphysical-strength enterprise.
A journey which philosophy started and science is having to complete. Getting at the Cosmos as the growth of rational habits, the manifestation of inevitable order, a process of dialectical evolution. A natural logic truly worth understanding even jf you just want to get at the cognitive mechanics of forming inferences to the best explanation.
Quoting JuanZu
And do you think that he is absolutely sceptical? I don't.
Is the conversation about which bedrock is preferable, or is it about about whether we can avoid bedrock altogether? If the latter, then exactly how?
Quoting apokrisis
14 pages of fulmination to arrive at the blank refusal to address the topic of the thread. No one forced you to engage in a topic you have only contempt for. "It's your own time you're wasting."
"All powerful"? Whatever gives you that idea?
According to the theory, laws are relations between types of objects. These relations exist when and where these types exist. This removes the mystery associated with a platonic view of laws, by proposing they exist as part of the ontological structure of the world.
There's no reason to think they would change. Bare possibilities are irrelevant, because the theory is an inference to best explanation of regularities we observe in the world. The theory isn't dependent on the tentative current state of the discipline of physics; if an apparent "law of physics" were to change, it would be imply there's more to this "law of physics" than we thought.
Is there one big law? That might be the case if monism is true. But these questions are irrelevant to the theory.
Quoting Banno
By page 4, the subject had switched to abduction.
Just that on that view matter always obeys laws.
Quoting Relativist
Oh, OK. That weakens their claim to be real, perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe they are real, but not in the sense of having an independent existence from the systems they govern. I'm not familiar with the view. Interesting though. I can think of further problems - is the generation of objects governed by laws, or do the laws only exist once the object exist? Why does the same type of law always occur with the same type of objects? Why is there consistency across space and time?
Also consider Goodman's new riddle because it's fun. Lets say we have a model arrived at by abduction that predicts that water boils at 100C at earth surface pressure. Now let 'roil' mean 'boils at 100C before 2030 and boils at 150C after". Now do we have two model-predictions that are equally supported by evidence:
Model 1: Water will boil at 100C at Earth surface pressure next week
Model 2: Water will roil at 100C at Earth surface pressure next week
We all presumably think Model 1 is likely to survive the year 2030 and we will abandon model 2, but why? Is there a reason to prefer model 1 over model 2?
Science doesn't need to worry about this, it gets on fine. But this is philosophy, so we do this kind of shit.
This is traditionally framed as a problem for induction. But does abduction help particularly?
(hopefully I've got Goodman roughly right, correct me if not)
Not so uninteresting as some.
So sure, take Maxwell's equations and apply gauge symmetry, and "the answer just jumps out"; but don't then claim that the theory is ex nihilo; it used Maxwell's equations and gauge symmetry.
It's not weak at all. It's referred to as existing "immanently". In metaphysics, an immanent property is one that exists within an object itself, as opposed to a transcendent property that would exist beyond or outside it.
The -1 electric charge of an electron exists immanently in an electron. It seems to me that immanent properties make more sense then having properties be independent things because then you'd have to account for how these properties attach, and explain what they're attaching to (are they attaching to a thing lacking any properties at all?!)
The attraction between an electron and proton is a relational property that exists imminently in an electron-proton pair. There's no evidence that their attraction is contingent on anything other than the properties of each of the objects and their proximity.
Quoting bert1
Yes and no.
The laws exist iff the set of objects exists in the arrangement that exhibits the law. If inflation theory is correct, then there was a time in the universe in which no particles existed - so there were no electron-proton pairs, and thus no laws could be exhibited between them.
However, the fact that such a law would be exhibited when protons and electrons came about would have been baked into the physics of the quantum fields - so ultimately (and assuming reductionism is true) the electron-proton law is just exhibiting more fundamental natural law that would always have been present.
[Quote]Why does the same type of law always occur with the same type of objects?[/quote]
Remember that the existence of laws of nature is a hypothesis, one that best explains the empirical evidence. I argue that this hypothesis is an "inference to best explanation" for these regularities. You could counter this claim by presenting an alternative hypothesis that you can show to be a better explanation. The hypothesis seems to be consistent with what we know about the world through physics.
But GIVEN the hypothesis that there are laws of nature, it is the case that a set of objects arranged in a particular way that exhibits a law of nature will do so necessarily. That's simply what it means to be a law: it is a necessary relation that exists between types of things.
Because the relevant objects in the past are the same sort of objects that exist in the present and future.
Yes. You measure your worth in mentions. What could be more cringe?
Quoting Banno
Exactly. Which was the point. :up:
There were the Bayesian priors. And they could be well chosen for a reason. The answer might have lain anywhere. But it became tightly constrained to a somewhere.
A community of inquiry exploring a new physical paradigm quantum theory had to reconcile it with another newish paradigm relativity and this combo of priors drove it rapidly to the only logically self-consistent outcome possible. Quantum field theory.
Maths or at least algebraic geometry and matrix multiplication was discovered to be "unreasonably effective". A level of theory so robust that even its observables were determined. Establish the symmetry and its symmetry breakings came with it. Something that seemed like Platonic magic.
A trick that folk like string theorists have been trying to repeat to reach their goal of a total symmetrification of existence in terms of quantum gravity as the final theory of everything. But something went wrong. Physics had made its extraordinary leap pursuing one uber-paradigm the merger of two quite contradictory seeming paradigms and then stalled.
A huge army of the best minds found themselves bashing their heads against a new wall. Symmetry had turned into the enemy when the moment came to make the last push and assimilate general relativity to quantum field theory (that being the Bayesian prior that felt right to the particle physics community, having already worked so splendidly with special relativity being assimilated to quantum mechanics.).
String theory still persists. You can't kill a bad paradigm until a better one comes along. But the lack of observables is seeing it fade out to be "just interesting maths". Not "unreasonably effective" maths.
So this is a nice little tale of how science works. Plug in the right priors and you create a context that narrows your search to its most fruitful avenues of thought. Follow the symmetries, became the collective thought. And that worked splendidly until it didn't.
This is the theory space I am now interested in. The need for a fresh IBE. But one that is a refinement on what already works. You can't junk everything. That's how crackpots think. You want to jettison the right things.
Penrose for example a great illustration as he his very public about his creative process argues that the error is trying to assimilate the complex number magic of the quantum to the real number realm of gravity. GR doesn't reduce to QFT. It has to be the other way around.
So at heart, a pretty simple flip in priors. The obvious logic of counterfactuality. If pushing on the door doesn't work, pull it instead. One is never working without a context of established rational habit. Abduction always starts standing on the shoulders of giants. It is never "just a lucky guess".
As I have remarked many times, my own expectation is that rather than symmetries all the way down, it is symmetry breaking all the way down. And that is the systems view first outlined by Anaximander, and brought home nicely by Peirce, to be generally confirmed by more recent scientific developments such as not only the stories of Big Bang cosmology and the topological hierarchy of the Standard Model of particle physics, but of course, the failure to unify GR and QFT by a simple reductionist metaphysics.
The current impasse is exhibit A in the argument that it is instead dichotomies all the way down. Or at least until you strike the vagueness that Peirce defined in logic as the failure of the PNC to apply. The unity at the bottom of it all has to have the irreducible complexity of a triadic relation. And indeed, we already know this from Okun's cube of theories. The fact that the whole edifice of modern fundamental physics has been about taking the Planck triad of constants c, G and h and combining them to create a structure of theories.
You add c to Newtonian mechanics to get special relativity. You add h, and you instead get quantum mechanics. You add the c to h and you get quantum field theory. You add the G to the c and you get general relativity.
So you wind up with GR and QFT as both having eaten two of the three Planck constants. GR eats cG, and QFT eats ch. Naturally it is by now bleeding obvious one must finish the job with a theory of quantum gravity. A final theory that eats all three constants as cGh.
[Or actually I find there is this neat new website with animations devoted to the cube. Check https://cube-of-physics.org.]
The belief in quantum gravity seems a necessary truth. The wall physics has been banging its head against for longer than it took to figure out GR and QFT. Again, this is how the process of scientific reasoning actually plays out. Your priors just become so specific as you follow the trail of what has worked. Any IBE-ing has become as constrained as driving your 18-wheeler semi up a tiny country road.
But as I say, you can make a bigger inversion than Penrose suggests. Not just apply the symmetry flip of GR=>QFT into QFT=>GR, but apply the larger flip of symmetry=>symmetry-breaking. You start from the cGh of the Planck scale as itself a unity of opposites. The unit 1 description of not three disparate constants but of the one irreducible triad of relations. A collection of self-organising fundamental ratios.
The first breaking that could then keep breaking forever. Or at least until its Heat Death saw it all fizzle to effectively nothing. The biggest and coldest nothing that could ever exist in terms a dichotomisation under the complementary bounds of Nature described by GR and QFT.
So does this have anything much to do with Hume's scepticism and even Peirce's abduction by now? Well it certainly ought to inform any current Philosophy of Science in terms of what we've actually got done.
We have both success and failure to tell us about IBE in practice. Or Bayesian reasoning if you prefer. We can now see how Newton was standing on the shoulders of giants, but also why his turn towards blind faith in the maths I feign no hypotheses was indeed a paradigm shift that raced us all the way to QFT in particular. Just follow the damn symmetries no matter how weird its seems to start getting.
But then now, what about following the symmetry breakings instead? Or understand how the two ideas of the complementary limits of the third thing which really concerns us the asymmetry which is the actual hierarchical order of a Cosmos born of the self-stabilising balance of symmetries and their breaking.
Again, this was essentially the IBE already framed by Anaximander in simple physicalist terms, and what Peirce came to understand as both the structure of mathematical logic and cognitive reality. So it has a rich pedigree. Scoff all you like.
AI says:
The idea that entanglement entropy could give rise to spacetime is a frontier concept in theoretical physics, drawing connections between quantum mechanics and gravity through the holographic principle. This framework proposes that spacetime is not a fundamental entity but an emergent phenomenon arising from the collective quantum entanglement of microscopic degrees of freedom.
The proposal can be broken down into several key ideas:
The Ryu-Takayanagi formula
A foundational piece of this concept comes from the AdS/CFT correspondence, a duality between a gravitational theory in a certain spacetime (Anti-de Sitter, or AdS) and a quantum field theory (Conformal Field Theory, or CFT) living on its boundary.
The Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) formula explicitly links a geometric property in the gravitational bulk to an information-theoretic quantity in the boundary quantum field theory. It states:
(garbled)
This formula provides a precise mathematical recipe for calculating geometry from entanglement, suggesting that if we know the entanglement structure of the boundary quantum system, we can deduce the geometry of the bulk spacetime.
Spacetime connectivity from entanglement
Physicist Mark Van Raamsdonk built on the RT formula by considering how changes in entanglement affect spacetime geometry.
A connected universe: If a quantum field theory is prepared in a highly entangled state, the dual bulk geometry corresponds to a smooth, connected spacetime.
Disconnecting spacetime: If the entanglement between two separate parts of the quantum system is reduced to zero, the dual spacetime breaks apart into two disconnected regions. This suggests that entanglement is the "glue" that holds spacetime together.
Tensor networks and emergent geometry
To model how a continuous spacetime can arise from discrete quantum degrees of freedom, physicists use mathematical tools called tensor networks.
Microscopic network: A tensor network is a web of interconnected nodes that represents the structure of entanglement in a quantum state. The connections, or "links," of the network encode the quantum entanglement between degrees of freedom.
Macroscopic geometry: The geometry of the higher-dimensional bulk spacetime is modeled by the collective structure of this tensor network. The more entangled two regions are in the quantum network, the closer they are in the emergent spacetime geometry.
ER=EPR: Wormholes and entanglement
A striking conjecture by physicists Juan Maldacena and Leonard Susskind, known as "ER=EPR," proposes a deep connection between entanglement (EPR) and wormholes (ER).
Entangled particles: In the standard picture, two maximally entangled particles (an EPR pair) can be spatially separated by any distance without losing their quantum correlation.
Spacetime geometry: The ER=EPR conjecture suggests that the link between these two entangled particles is a microscopic, non-traversable wormhole (or Einstein-Rosen bridge). In this view, entanglement itself is a bridge through spacetime.
Emergent time
The relationship between entanglement and spacetime also offers a new perspective on the nature of time.
Timeless universe: Some interpretations of quantum gravity, such as the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, suggest a "frozen" or static universe at the fundamental level.
Emergent time flow: The experience of a flowing time could be an emergent property related to the constant evolution and growth of quantum entanglement throughout the universe. According to this idea, the arrow of time points in the direction of increasing entanglement.
The big picture
In summary, the theory that entanglement entropy gives rise to spacetime proposes a revolutionary reversal of our conventional understanding:
From geometry to information: Instead of spacetime being a fundamental backdrop in which quantum mechanics operates, the geometry of spacetime and even its existence are determined by the patterns of quantum entanglement within a more fundamental, information-based reality.
A computational universe: The universe can be viewed as a massive, continuous quantum computation, where spacetime, time, and gravity are the emergent macroscopic consequences of how information is processed and entangled at the quantum level.
Yep. But you see how the urge to collapse the holism of holography to some new form of reductionism shows itself once again. A Bayseian prior that most can't escape.
As soon as you discover the dichotomy as in AdS/CFT you must collapse it to a story where one is more fundamental than the other. One is baseline and the other emerges.
But I'm saying that it is instead the complementary limits on Being that emerge. The dichotomies or symmetry breaking is what it is about all the way down.
Besides, AdS/CFT has the fatal problem that it is anti-de Sitter spacetime and not de Sitter spacetime. And the Universe is de Sitter by observation. It even has the dark energy to prove it. A rather empirical constraint on the rational speculation.
But string theory still has hopes this keeps it going. One last swing for the stands. :grin:
The ordered phase of a deeper quantum system:
It seemed that its future could never be,
That its unfamed name was but written
On the water and the wind
With a feathery quill
Whose ink was the smoke and fog
Of Symmetrys shimmering dream;
But, ere the wind that could erase it blew,
Broken rotational symmetry
That immortalizing winter, flew
Athwart the streamand the printless torrent grew
A scroll of crystalgeometry as the condensate,
Blazoning the name of Space-time!