ID and infinite regression

[Agathon]

Repeating that it's an explanation doesn't turn it into one. It is not. You're assuming your conclusion.

I'm not. I gave the usual reasons for why there are no pure observational judgements. You haven't responded to that argument at all. Once that is granted the rest follows, because there are no longer a type of propositions about knowledge and cognition that are distinct from those of natural science. What we call philosophy, on this view, is the discipline that deals with the most abstract issues, ones that we call "conceptual", even though there really is no sharp distinction between the conceptual and empirical.

So freaking what? You were saying you didn't think people would believe electrons in a few hundred years, not that our view of them may change. Heck, there isn't even one today's view of electrons, but a number of different interpretations of what they're exactly are.

Which is why the naive view of correspondence is mistaken. You are so desperate to keep your conception of truth that you complained about the lack of correspondence to electrons, that you now admit are underdetermined.

May I remind you of this quote of yours? "There is nothing more to belief and meaning that ensuring congruence. That's what it's for. The concept of truth is also part of this practice." If that doesn't mean truth is about congruence, what the heck does it mean?

It means exactly what I said it means. Truth, belief and meaning are concepts used to effect communication. When we look at how people actually communicate, we find that they are interdependent concepts that link in such a way as to ensure that most beliefs are true.

If you want to say that truth is something else, then you have abandoned our ordinary linguistic practices in favour of some metaphysical hokum.

As I said before, it also follows from this view that beliefs are part of the world. To study their (causal) connections to the world is the province of natural science, not philosophy. You assume that congruence (or coherence) and correspondence are mutually exclusive. There's no reason to believe that. Our beliefs can be both coherent (as they largely are) and correspond to the things we talk about.

I'm not particularly interested in the nature of truth. As the saying goes, science doesn't deal in truth. What's interesting is if your view is useful for anything.

If you aren't interested in truth, then what the hell are you bothering for. If you want to argue about how our beliefs are justified, you need to understand truth, since knowledge is usually regarded as justified true belief.

The view is useful precisely for countering traditional scepticism, which holds that we can have perfectly meaningful beliefs, but all or most of them can be false. The holist view of belief provides a reason for thinking that this cannot be the case - belief and meaning are interdependent concepts.

I still don't get why you think it matter whether beliefs are part of the world or not. It should be patently obvious that being part of the world is no guarantee of being out of accord with some other aspect of the world. If it were, it would be impossible to have any false beliefs if beliefs are part of the world, yet you hold beliefs are part of the world and accept that people can hold false beliefs.

It matters because many people have held a representational account of belief. If you think that is right, then we never have the ability to get outside our beliefs to check whether they match the world or not. If beliefs are part of the world and their causal connections are studied by natural science, then it follows that the kind of scepticism that traditional philosophy engaged in must be replaced by the more limited scepticism of the sciences. That sort of scepticism is manageable – the other one is not.

I have dreary premonition that your definition of "language" is going to imply translatability. So, disappoint me - show how this follows without defining it into the concept of language.

It follows from the interdependence of belief and meaning. These are concepts we use to interpret the behaviour of other language users. There will always be an infinite number of translations that fit the behavioural evidence, and it is always possible to come up with some interpretation of a language user for this reason. People might worry that we can never find out what the other person really means, but there is in fact no such thing because of the underdetermination. An infinite number of translations will be correct, but we just choose the one that is easiest and effects communication the best.

The primary purpose of language is not to describe the world, but to communicate with other people. It is irreducibly social. False belief is a concept we use to make it easier to interpret the behaviour of others. When faced with a person who is saying strange things we have a choice: we can think that they have a strange language where words change their meanings in specific contexts, or we can choose to retain the meaning and attribute to them a false belief.

When you look at how language actually works, this is crushingly obvious.

I'm not quite sure what you think my position is.

You keep raising objections that rely on the old correspondence or representational theory to make sense. That is exactly what is in dispute here. People think that sceptical arguments that stem from the old view are used by philosophers merely to be a nuisance. In philosophy we do not take scepticism as obviously true, but as a reason to rethink the problematic notions of truth, belief and meaning that are causing the problem. A good start is to look at how people normally use the words before constructing a theory about it. Otherwise the theory has no connection with reality at all.

It's not readily apparent to me how a measurement (as opposed to its interpretation) could be theory dependent, but it doesn't matter either way.

Because every belief that you acquire by measuring depends on a whole other stack of beliefs about measurement to make sense. Please read up on semantic and epistemological holism before you respond.

The underdetermination thesis proves this. There will always be a number of theories that fit the evidence we have, and attempting to find some propositions that are just self evident and simply true and are dependent on having an experience fails because the traditional sceptical arguments have shown one thing: underdetermination goes down all the way to our observational beliefs.

[Last Conformist]

Originally posted by Agathon

Repeating that it's an explanation doesn't turn it into one. It is not. You're assuming your conclusion.

I'm not.

Yes you are. You're saying we should find out how our beliefs are formed by natural science, when the trustworthiness of beliefs based on natural science is precisely what we'd like to establish.

I gave the usual reasons for why there are no pure observational judgements. You haven't responded to that argument at all.

Why should I respond to it? Nobody is arguing there are pure observational judgements here.

Once that is granted the rest follows, because there are no longer a type of propositions about knowledge and cognition that are distinct from those of natural science.

That does in no way establish the reliability of such knowledge.

What we call philosophy, on this view, is the discipline that deals with the most abstract issues, ones that we call "conceptual", even though there really is no sharp distinction between the conceptual and empirical.

So freaking what? You were saying you didn't think people would believe electrons in a few hundred years, not that our view of them may change. Heck, there isn't even one today's view of electrons, but a number of different interpretations of what they're exactly are.

Which is why the naive view of correspondence is mistaken. You are so desperate to keep your conception of truth that you complained about the lack of correspondence to electrons, that you now admit are underdetermined.

Science is about making models that predict - ie. corresponds to - the behaviour of real-world phenomena. Since real-world phenomena are always underdetermined, we can just as well throw science out of the window if underdetermination is a problem for correspondence. If all knowledge is scientific knowledge (as you seem to imply above), we can further throw out all knowledge.

May I remind you of this quote of yours? "There is nothing more to belief and meaning that ensuring congruence. That's what it's for. The concept of truth is also part of this practice." If that doesn't mean truth is about congruence, what the heck does it mean?

It means exactly what I said it means. Truth, belief and meaning are concepts used to effect communication. When we look at how people actually communicate, we find that they are interdependent concepts that link in such a way as to ensure that most beliefs are true.

If you want to say that truth is something else, then you have abandoned our ordinary linguistic practices in favour of some metaphysical hokum.

As I said before, it also follows from this view that beliefs are part of the world. To study their (causal) connections to the world is the province of natural science, not philosophy. You assume that congruence (or coherence) and correspondence are mutually exclusive. There's no reason to believe that. Our beliefs can be both coherent (as they largely are) and correspond to the things we talk about.

No, I don't assume that. I do assume that congruence does not necessarily imply correspondence. You must agree with this, since you said two people can share the same false belief.

I'm not particularly interested in the nature of truth. As the saying goes, science doesn't deal in truth. What's interesting is if your view is useful for anything.

If you aren't interested in truth, then what the hell are you bothering for. If you want to argue about how our beliefs are justified, you need to understand truth, since knowledge is usually regarded as justified true belief.

I got into this because you were complaining about how scientists think about truth and belief - I thought I might learn something useful about how to think about science.

Oh, and I like to argue.

The view is useful precisely for countering traditional scepticism, which holds that we can have perfectly meaningful beliefs, but all or most of them can be false. The holist view of belief provides a reason for thinking that this cannot be the case - belief and meaning are interdependent concepts.

I still don't get why you think it matter whether beliefs are part of the world or not. It should be patently obvious that being part of the world is no guarantee of being out of accord with some other aspect of the world. If it were, it would be impossible to have any false beliefs if beliefs are part of the world, yet you hold beliefs are part of the world and accept that people can hold false beliefs.

It matters because many people have held a representational account of belief. If you think that is right, then we never have the ability to get outside our beliefs to check whether they match the world or not. If beliefs are part of the world and their causal connections are studied by natural science, then it follows that the kind of scepticism that traditional philosophy engaged in must be replaced by the more limited scepticism of the sciences. That sort of scepticism is manageable – the other one is not.

You're again assuming the validity of natural science as a way to learn about the world.

(You're also appealing to causality, a concept whose applicability to the real world is rather suspect.)

I have dreary premonition that your definition of "language" is going to imply translatability. So, disappoint me - show how this follows without defining it into the concept of language.

It follows from the interdependence of belief and meaning. These are concepts we use to interpret the behaviour of other language users. There will always be an infinite number of translations that fit the behavioural evidence, and it is always possible to come up with some interpretation of a language user for this reason. People might worry that we can never find out what the other person really means, but there is in fact no such thing because of the underdetermination. An infinite number of translations will be correct, but we just choose the one that is easiest and effects communication the best.

The primary purpose of language is not to describe the world, but to communicate with other people. It is irreducibly social. False belief is a concept we use to make it easier to interpret the behaviour of others. When faced with a person who is saying strange things we have a choice: we can think that they have a strange language where words change their meanings in specific contexts, or we can choose to retain the meaning and attribute to them a false belief.

Nah, we assume they're speaking a foreign language.

That humans can, if with great difficulty, learn a foreign language without the help of bilingual tutors is because there are non-verbal aspects of human communication that are culture-independent. It seems uncertain whether we could ever communicate with an alien that did not share any communicational strategies at all with us - we'd probably never realize it was even trying to communicate.

When you look at how language actually works, this is crushingly obvious.

I'm not quite sure what you think my position is.

You keep raising objections that rely on the old correspondence or representational theory to make sense. That is exactly what is in dispute here. People think that sceptical arguments that stem from the old view are used by philosophers merely to be a nuisance. In philosophy we do not take scepticism as obviously true, but as a reason to rethink the problematic notions of truth, belief and meaning that are causing the problem. A good start is to look at how people normally use the words before constructing a theory about it. Otherwise the theory has no connection with reality at all.

It's not readily apparent to me how a measurement (as opposed to its interpretation) could be theory dependent, but it doesn't matter either way.

Because every belief that you acquire by measuring depends on a whole other stack of beliefs about measurement to make sense. Please read up on semantic and epistemological holism before you respond.

That'll have to wait for another day, but you seem to've shifted the subject from measurements to beliefs formed by measurement.

The underdetermination thesis proves this. There will always be a number of theories that fit the evidence we have, and attempting to find some propositions that are just self evident and simply true and are dependent on having an experience fails because the traditional sceptical arguments have shown one thing: underdetermination goes down all the way to our observational beliefs.

[Agathon]

Yes you are. You're saying we should find out how our beliefs are formed by natural science, when the trustworthiness of beliefs based on natural science is precisely what we'd like to establish.

Oh for God's sake.... I have said numerous times now that science is involved in the explanation of our beliefs and not their justification. If you want a justification, the holist explanation of the interdependence of belief and meaning is the only one available.

Please read what I write and think about it before posting obviously ignorant responses.

Science is about making models that predict - ie. corresponds to - the behaviour of real-world phenomena. Since real-world phenomena are always underdetermined, we can just as well throw science out of the window if underdetermination is a problem for correspondence. If all knowledge is scientific knowledge (as you seem to imply above), we can further throw out all knowledge.

No we don't. Nor do we have to throw away language even if that is underdetermined. We simply choose the explanation that is easiest. Ockham's razor is not just a principle you can take or leave, it is in fact crucial to our ability to think.

All that the underdetermination thesis does is show that the underdetermination that applies to science in its ordinary sense (manageable scientific scepticism) applies to knowledge in general, including what used to be thought of as the province of philosophy.

No, I don't assume that. I do assume that congruence does not necessarily imply correspondence. You must agree with this, since you said two people can share the same false belief.

WTF are you talking about? People can share the same false belief, but that doesn't make the belief true. However the fact that people can share the same false beliefs requires that most of their beliefs be true.

You are imposing an idealist requirement where there is none.

I got into this because you were complaining about how scientists think about truth and belief - I thought I might learn something useful about how to think about science.

Oh, and I like to argue

Unfortunately, your mode of argument seems to be the pointless Monty Python sort.

Nah, we assume they're speaking a foreign language.

That humans can, if with great difficulty, learn a foreign language without the help of bilingual tutors is because there are non-verbal aspects of human communication that are culture-independent. It seems uncertain whether we could ever communicate with an alien that did not share any communicational strategies at all with us - we'd probably never realize it was even trying to communicate.

Oh man... the whole point of radical interpretation is that it supposes that the only difference between interpreting a foreign language and your own is one of habit. The evidentiary resources are the same in both case. As for the alien example, it is possible that someone's language would be too complex or weird for us to notice, but that doesn't make it untranslatable per se. When philosophers say possible, they generally mean logical possibility and that is not the same as "we can't do it because of physical restraints".

That'll have to wait for another day, but you seem to've shifted the subject from measurements to beliefs formed by measurement.

No I didn't. Look back again. I pointed out that only beliefs matter to justification. Other things can cause beliefs, but they cannot be appealed to in justification because only beliefs can stand in inferential relations to beliefs.

At least try to read what I write. It is becoming tiresome to have to keep pointing back to my original claims.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Similarly, if history is any guide, today's scientists will look like idiotic fools in a few hundred years for much the same reason: taking for granted as features of reality things which are really the result of our concept mongering activities. A naive belief in empiricism is one of these.

Hey spiff, Agathon didn't want to explain what in history makes him believe that today's scientists will collectively look like idiotic fools but maybe you wouldn't mind explaining your reasoning?

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Geronimo
Hey spiff, Agathon didn't want to explain what in history makes him believe that today's scientists will collectively look like idiotic fools but maybe you wouldn't mind explaining your reasoning?

Well, I don't think that all scientists (not even most of them) will look like "idiotic fools " in the future, because humans tend to be nice to their primitive ancestors. When we will be the "primitive ancestors", the peole will be amazed by the achievements we could achieve despite having so many wrong ideas


My point is more specific: I think that a blind trust in empiricism is a danger, and that too many scientists fall in that trap. Not all scientists are that naive, but sadly too many of them are.

Empiricism is essential to scientific progress (since science is about understanding the real world) but it is 1) insufficient and 2) flawed.

I don't have much time now, but basically, the reason why it's 1) insufficient is because you cannot understand the mechanics that underlie an observed phenomenon if you don't think about it. The human mind is feeble and can't directly understand the universe, which is why we have conceptual tools that we use to grasp it (words, mathematics, categories, logics etc.) These conceptual tools aren't perfect either, but they're absolutely essential to draw some sense from the observed phenomena.

2) It's flawed because our observation of the universe depends on our means of measurement. And measurements aren't really an easy thing to do. As a social scientist, I am confronted to the problem all the time. But "hard scientists" do have a problem as well (albeit less spectacularly), considering that their measurements are fully human concepts that they apply to reality: Reality doesn't care for meters, kilogrammes, or Kelvins. We invented these things, they are fully artificial.

If we remain aware of the limitations of empiricism, it's good, and we'll be able to improve on our methods. However, if we are naive about it, if we are arrogant in the scientific method, we'd be considered like asses. In my field, there have been quite a few" scientists" who believed to have found The Truth out of sheer arrogance. I'm sure we're not the only field of science where it is so

[aneeshm]

Now two philosopher-pedants are going for each other's throats in my thread . God , what have I unleashed ?

[Odin]

Originally posted by Spiffor

If we remain aware of the limitations of empiricism, it's good, and we'll be able to improve on our methods. However, if we are naive about it, if we are arrogant in the scientific method, we'd be considered like asses. In my field, there have been quite a few" scientists" who believed to have found The Truth out of sheer arrogance. I'm sure we're not the only field of science where it is so

My "Philosophy of Science" is that all theories are approximations of reality, and that the point of science is to get better aproximations. I think a major problem is that speculation ends up becoming dogma too way too easily if the scientist doing the speculating is well respected.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Odin

My "Philosophy of Science" is that all theories are approximations of reality, and that the point of science is to get better aproximations. I think a major problem is that speculation ends up becoming dogma too way too easily if the scientist doing the speculating is well respected.

How could you tell that was true, if all theories are approximations?

[loinburger]

Agathon's in the right here. Hell, even a "fact" like "the cat is on the mat" relies on a whole slew of beliefs on spatial orientation, gravity, etc. We all share these beliefs, so "the cat is on the mat" is a coherent statement, but there's nothing to prevent me, given an identical physical state, from stating that "the mat is on the cat" in conjunction with alternate beliefs on spatial orientation, gravity, etc.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by loinburger
Agathon's in the right here. Hell, even a "fact" like "the cat is on the mat" relies on a whole slew of beliefs on spatial orientation, gravity, etc. We all share these beliefs, so "the cat is on the mat" is a coherent statement, but there's nothing to prevent me, given an identical physical state, from stating that "the mat is on the cat" in conjunction with alternate beliefs on spatial orientation, gravity, etc.

how does it follow from that that todays scientists will collectively look like idiotic fools? What you are describing is quite different from what agathon is insisting.

[loinburger]

They'll certainly look like fools if they insist that their "facts" are absolute. However, in my experience scientists (experienced ones, at least) don't make this error. Agathon's statement may be the result of having had to teach one too many Ashers in philosophy of science courses. It may also result from an erroneous belief about how scientists view the work of past scientists -- even when learning about "aether" and "phlogistan" and similar outdated theories in my physics courses it was never stated that the scientists who came up with these theories were stupid.

[Odin]

Originally posted by loinburger

Agathon's statement may be the result of having had to teach one too many Ashers in philosophy of science courses. It may also result from an erroneous belief about how scientists view the work of past scientists -- even when learning about "aether" and "phlogistan" and similar outdated theories in my physics courses it was never stated that the scientists who came up with these theories were stupid.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by loinburger
They'll certainly look like fools if they insist that their "facts" are absolute. However, in my experience scientists (experienced ones, at least) don't make this error. Agathon's statement may be the result of having had to teach one too many Ashers in philosophy of science courses. It may also result from an erroneous belief about how scientists view the work of past scientists -- even when learning about "aether" and "phlogistan" and similar outdated theories in my physics courses it was never stated that the scientists who came up with these theories were stupid.

But it's often stated that people like the Presocratic philosophers were stupid, even though the same argument applies to their work.

It's true that aether and phlogiston are a lot less weird than saying that the world is made of water, but the argument applies to both. The Presocratics just didn't make the same distinctions we do.. these are useful distinctions to make, but that doesn't make them somehow magically responsive to an empirical "given".

[Odin]

Originally posted by Agathon


But it's often stated that people like the Presocratic philosophers were stupid,

Why would somebody call Thales and Democritus stupid just because they didn't have the technology to do particle physics?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Odin


Why would somebody call Thales and Democritus stupid just because they didn't have the technology to do particle physics?

I take it you don't read the OT much.