(PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION) Someone smarter than I am will have t

(PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION)

Someone smarter than I am will have to take on the burden of creating a symbolic logic of action in disequilibrium. But I suspect that we already have it, in the scientific method. And that the attempts to conjoin formal logic of certainty with critical rationalism in science are operationally distinct fields.

That isn’t saying it’s not possible. Its saying that we haven’t done it, and that Quine’s criticism of Popper is false.

On the other hand, it is entirely possible that I don’t understand something, since I don’t have a lot of respect for formal logic as having application to actions. And, as a political economist, and philosopher of action, my priorities are different. SInce I don’t respect it, I haven’t spent much time studying it.

It reminds me of war games and chess. They are, to some degree Ludic fallacies. Wars are won by precisely those criteria that war games and chess present as constants: informational asymmetry: deception, misinformation, and incomplete information, combined with differences in velocity and the concentration of forces. I gave up on both those enterprises for the same reason: as structured they are puzzles not problems.

There is a difference between puzzles and problems. I view formal logic as an interesting puzzle, but political economy as a material problem.

This is just a preference after all. I’m not making a moral argument. I’m simply taking the position that the physical sciences and formal logic are easier to solve than economic problems. The universe equilibrates. But human beings are RED QUEENS: we are always trying to outrun it by outwitting it, and that means we must seek to create disequilibria.

That is a different way of saying that we must constantly battle ‘the dark forces of time and ignorance’ in order to stay alive on the universe’s treadmill by seeking and creating disequliibria both with nature and with each other.

Certainty then, in any sense, despite the ease that would bring to our minds, by obviating the constant need for problem solving, would in fact, result in our extinction.