Category: Epistemology and Method

EVERY DISCIPLINE CAME CLOSE, BUT NONE SOLVED IT : TRUTH

—“Truth is replaced by (algorithmic) proof as a primitive notion, and

Existence requires constructibility.”—

It’s interesting (telling?) that Bridgman did his work on Operationalism (in psychology, where I first came across it, it’s “Operationism”), because he understood that the only reason that Physics had not discovered Einstein’s relativity earlier, and the profession had spent years on fallacies, was because they didn’t practice operationalism: articulating (constructions) of all their ideas so that when they extended an abstract idea, they revisited all its underlying assumptions.

Now, Operationalism is practiced in Psychology as a matter of course, and in as much of physical science as is possible without unnecessary constraint. But the problem remains extant in most disciplines where it has been addressed somehow or other by the mathematicians including Brouwer on in Intuitionist Mathematics, and from Poincare on in Constructivist Mathematics, and the logicians through Kripke and Goedel, and much less intelligently, Mises in Economics, and with less success in law, from the antebellum period through the present on Textualism, Originalism, and Strict Constructionism. And the concept is completely missing from ethics.

Which is strange because **operationalism is an ethical not logical constraint** on our thinking. We cannot make honest truth claims without it, but that does not constrain us from making approximate deductions – explorations. Exploration is approximate by definition.

So, I am once again at the realization that the failure of the greeks to solve the problem of free riding, property rights and voluntary exchange, and therefore ethics is the cause of so much of our intellectual failure over the centuries. The answer was sort of sitting there in law but no one seems to have really done much with it.

And so uniting all the logics and all the branches of philosophy into a single contiguous, consistent system has been impossible. But it’s not impossible..

It was just sitting there. I dunno. At this point it looks obvious. But that’s because I ran into the ‘economic calculation’ argument, and property rights. And when I did, everything else slowly fell into place. Because they are necessary rather than preferential statements. I think they may be the most important insight into logic that has ever occurred.

I just don’t understand why it took us so long. Maybe we had to cook individualism sufficiently? I don’t know yet. That seems like the answer.