IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRICISM, OPERATIONALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM. Theories must some

IN DEFENSE OF EMPIRICISM, OPERATIONALISM AND INSTRUMENTALISM.

Theories must somehow be made extant (constructed). What action renders them extant? If falsification hardens theories, why must they be hardened? What is the purpose of talking about that which we imagine, if not to test it? Why do we need truth except to test correspondence with reality?

I intuit a problem. I imagine a theory. I describe it in words. I imagine a test of that theory. I construct a test of that theory using instrumentation. I test that theory by taking actions to do so. I observe the results of those actions with and without instrumentation. (repeat).

This process requires observation (empiricism), instruments(instrumentalism), operations(operationalism). But in all cases, we start with intuition (pre-cognitive) and imagination (cognitive), and in all cases, all observations of actions in the real world must be reduced to an analogy to experience such that we can apprehend it with our senses. With practice we can learn to habituate general rules that we in turn can apprehend, because of habituation of individual cases. But in all cases, we apprehend only what we can apprehend with our senses.

Likewise we lack the ability to compare and contrast complex information, and as such we must rely on instrumentation (numbers, symbols, transformations (operations) to assist us in our thinking.

Note that In the preceding three paragraphs I rely upon actions, not platonism or obscurantism (the use of ‘is’).

Falsification forces us to overcome the cognitive bias of confirmation (a biological necessity for the conservation of energy). Operationalism forces us to overcome the cognitive bias of conflating imagination and action such that we know whether or not we understand the means of constructing (acting) such that the concepts we rely upon are understood, and therefore our claims are ‘true’ – or whether they are conveniently not understood and therefore our claims CANNOT be true and are therefore ‘false’.

One cannot attest to unconstructed imagination and make a true statement, any more than one can attest to the truth of a theory that has not been subject to falsification.

As far as I know it is impossible to refute this argument, and it is, at least in sketch, a refutation of Kant’s appeal to the authority of apriorism. And that refutation is supported by the relatively recent findings of cognitive science and experimental psychology.

This bundle of ideas meaning that the failure of the previous generation in which popper was a member, was an insufficient disregard for remnants of religion and platonist philosophy, entrapment in the russellian program’s attempt at claiming philosophy as science, and an insufficient regard for the operational methods of science.

If one cannot state one’s concepts in operational language, one does not understand them. And as failing to understand them, cannot levy truth claims about them. Knowledge of use != Knowledge of construction. I may ACT with knowledge of use, but I may not make truth claims without knowledge of construction.

This constraint for operational language places higher demands on speakers in the same way that falsification places higher demand on speakers.

Cheers

Curt