ISN”T A PRIORISM A TRIVIAL CASE? (test post) —“Curt Doolittle said “… and th

ISN”T A PRIORISM A TRIVIAL CASE?

(test post)

—“Curt Doolittle said “… and then to claim that a priori and a posteriori are different classes of knowledge rather than the apriori is but a special case of the universal epistemological sequence we mistakenly call the scientific method …”—

—“I’d like to hear more about this. With what people call ‘a priori propositions,’ I cannot even conceive of a world in which they are false; they’re logically necessary. With what are called ‘a posteriori propositions,’ I can imagine a possible world in which they are false; they are logically contingent. Are you saying that logically necessary propositions are also known to be true by way of experience?”— Ulysses Aaron Cartwright :

Great question.

We can have this discussion most easily by :

– Examining cases of tautology -> non contradiction > correspondence -> correlation -> analogy

– Just like we can with tautology-> deduction -> induction -> abduction -> guess

– Just as we can with tautology -> law -> theory -> hypothesis -> free association

– Just as we can with naming -> counting -> Arithmetic -> accounting -> Geometry -> and calculus;

– Just as we can with all other dimensional criticisms of the epistemological spectrum.

But I sense that by merely enumerating this subset of spectra that you can see that statements claimed to be apriori are just reductio instances of informational-coincidence as much as are those of prime numbers.

Such statements exist as prime numbers exist but they are merely a simplistic subset expressive in common language as are prime numbers an artifact of the base number system.

There is but one epistemological method for all of mankind.

*Free association->hypothesis->theory->law->tautology.*

When criticizing any statement we have a number of dimensions we can test.

1- Categorical consistency (identity)

2 – Internal consistency (logic)

3 – External consistency (correspondence)

4 – Existential Consistency (operational language)

5 – Moral consistency (rational reciprocal volution)

6 – And scope consistency. (full accounting, limits, parsimony)

We can express theories in any of these dimensions using the language of the method of testing that dimension.

We can also see if statements that survive in a lower dimension still survive in a higher dimension.

In the case of apriori statements they rarely survive scope consistency. In other words, they are often not false but they are also often in-actionable. [1]

This is an example of the difference between ‘meaningful'(creating associations, communicating) and ‘true’ (parsimony, criticism).

If we take a case by case non-trivial study, then it is unclear whether we are saying something meaningful (educational) or something critical (parsimoniously descriptive).

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

[1] I usually use the examples: (i) neutrality of money (ii) minimum wages increase unemployment, (iii) the unpredictability of gasses (iv) the scope of newton’s laws.