Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

JUSTIFICATION VS CRITICISM : WARRANTY IN CONTRACT VS EXPLORATION

(from elsewhere)

James Stevens Valliant :

Just wanted to say that you argued this topic quite well. And I was trying to think if I could give you any language that would help you in the future.

You have one position that I think is correct, and one that I think you should consider modifying. First, I agree that knowledge is reconstructed from information, just as meaning is transferred by the use of analogies to transfer properties. So information exists without a knowing subject. And that information may be very good, or very bad at producing the experience of knowledge in a subject.

Second is the problem of conflating (a)awareness, (b)risk, (c)truth content, and truth content consist of two additional properties: (c.i)persuasive power, and (c.ii)parsimonious correspondence with reality (what we mean by ‘true’).

The reason that discussion of knowledge is problematic is that this term is a sort of catch-all for these separate properties. And so like many concepts, argument is a problem of conflating properties, each of which exists on a separate spectrum.

“Knowing” could mean ‘awareness gained through experience’, or ‘given what we know from experience, I am willing to act upon it’, or knowing could mean ‘through experience we believe this is true’.

–“If you think that knowledge is something other than true belief, then we also strongly differ. For that old fashioned kind of knowledge, contact with reality is required. But at least you know that I know what we normally call “science” already assumes a mountain of knowledge.”–

So I think that the only POSSIBLE meaning of the category ‘knowledge’ is ‘awareness of a regular pattern that allows us to predict something, even if it is only to predict in the sense of identifying something as part of a category – the most simple prediction possible.

And then we have the persuasive power of knowledge in convincing the self or others, first to state something is possible, then second to state something is worthy of action (risk).

For example, no one ‘knows’ how to build a computer (or a cheeseburger for that matter) in the sense that they possess knowledge of construction of the constituent parts. So some knowledge can never be centralized except as a hierarchy of abstractions – trust in one another’s claim to actionable knowledge.

For these reasons (the number of causal axis in the category we call knowledge), I think we cannot improve upon casting knowledge as awareness, all knowledge theoretical, where theoretical contains both persuasive power in an honest discourse(risk reduction), and truth content( parsimonious correspondence with reality).

So I my problem is that ‘justified true belief’ is not false under the test of risk, but is not meaningful under the test of analytic truth. In this sense, it depends upon which thing we are talking about: willingness to act (justified true belief), willingness of others to insure actions (contractual justified true belief), and analytic truth (parsimonious correspondence with reality). If a man gives witness in testimony and later on we find a video of the events, and it turns out that he is wrong, but that it is easy to understand how he was mistaken, we do not consider his testimony false. We only warranty what rational man is capable of warranting. In science we warranty that we have done due diligence: we have criticized our own arguments. We testify that we have done due diligence – we have criticized our own position.

In this sense both justified true belief is necessary for contractual propositions, while critical rationalism (warranty) is the only epistemological possibility.

The fact that argument evolved out of law (debate in the polis) probably explains the origin of conflation of contractual justification according to the norms of the polity, with the pursuit of analytic truth in epistemological exploration.

The fact that most human action is contractual, and very little of it epistemic, explains the persistence of both the contractual (justificationary),and epistemic (critical scientific) as practices, and the conflation of the term knowledge as a general term covering both contractual and epistemic uses. Norms guide most human actions. Norms are habituated and therefore reduced to intuitions to function. The norms is contractual (justificationary – so that we avoid blame). Science produces not actions but testimony. The problem is inverted. In science all we produce is testimony regardless of normative rules. In normative relations we produce actions that we justify as according to the normative rules of society. So we testify that we were justified according to norms in contractual relations, and we testify that our statements are free of norms, imaginary, error, bias, habituated deception and outright deception, in science. This is why science is a luxury good: it’s terribly expensive, and scientific testimony is terribly expensive. Justification allows us to use scientifically tested or evolutionarily tested general rules in real world actions – contracts.

And must. We cannot create general rules out of justificationary testimony, only out of critical testimony. For this reason, both justificationary and critical testimony will persist forever. While our warranties must be given by critical means, our testimony is forever justificationary. (I think that is fairly profound).

As far as I know, albeit in brief, this is the most accurate statement of our extant understanding of the question of knowledge, and why it has been so troublesome a concept.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine

NOTE: I have Kenneth blocked for personal attacks in defense of his ideological position, so I can’t see his posts. But I can understand your frustration. There is a reason why people feel they want to externalize responsibility for actions. And there is a long standing tradition of attempting to treat imaginary concepts as existential rather than experiential. And worse, in German, Jewish and Islamic cultures (not Anglo or Sinic) this is an attempt to create authoritarianism by abstracting the existential into the spiritual (metaphysical or platonic world.) So you have to look at such arguments as non logical, non-truthful, but mere justificationary attempts to establish traditional textual authority – something learned from monotheism. I am not really finished with my analysis of suggestion, loading, framing, overloading, conflation, and obscurantism as rationalist means of deception. I think a quick read of Kevin MacDonald’s analysis of the deceptive argumentative technique of Critique is probably very helpful to most – we can trace monotheistic argument, through greek, christian, and enlightenment, german and jewish counter-enlightenment thinkers. But the more I study the problem the more obvious it is that the purpose of science is to eliminate authority and the purpose of rationalism in all its forms, is to construct scriptural authority out of cunning but deceptive arguments. Science uses logic(internal consistency), experiment (external correspondence), operational definitions (existential possibility), falsification (parsimony), to create a testimony that one is speaking truthfully and non-allegorically, and his work is as free of imaginary content, whether it be error, bias, habituated (unconscious) deception or intentional deception – even if we never know if we speak the most parsimonious theory possible.