GETTING CLOSER TO CORRECTING THE CRITICAL RATIONALISTS —“We can only know when

GETTING CLOSER TO CORRECTING THE CRITICAL RATIONALISTS

—“We can only know when we speak falsehoods. We cannot know when we speak the truth. Therefore all we can ever do is testify truthfully. And we can only testify truthfully, even if we desire to, by operational description, because we ourselves are the victims of error, bias, wishful thinking, habit, and deception. So to speak truthfully is only possible if we limit ourselves to operational actions and measures. This does not convey ‘meaning’ which is what others often desire. We can either leave the derivation of meaning to others, or we can construct the meaning by way of analogy. The problem is, that when we construct an analogy, we must add information external to the facts. To convey meaning is not to convey the truth. One can convey meaning by analogy, but then one must provide operational descriptions in order to prove that one has not erred, biased, imagined, or lied. This argument, is the simplest reduction that I know of for the arguments of the intuitionists(mathematics), Operationists (psychology), and Operationalists (physics), and Praxeologists (economics). It is a moral restatement of the mathematical argument for the requirement of Reverse Russian Mathematics in order to make a truth claim. Speaking truthfully is merely a matter of whether we can testify to their existential possibility of their construction as well as the theory’s existential correspondence with demonstrable reality .”—

I think that when I was arguing with critical rationalists earlier in the year, I could not distill this argument down this far. Neither Poppers ‘meaning’ nor David’s formal logic solve this problem. As such I stipulate that this is the correct solution to the critical rationalist problem, and that as Alex has argued, popper was a cosmopolitan, and he was a victim of the vast legacy of cosmopolitan errors. He was half right but he was not right enough.