Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • OPERATIONALISM IS SYNONYMOUS WITH HUMAN ACTION I guess, I just assumed that it w

    OPERATIONALISM IS SYNONYMOUS WITH HUMAN ACTION

    I guess, I just assumed that it was so obvious that I didn’t need to say it. But apparently it’s not.

    So why would you try to rely on all this Kantian nonsense, in order to justify human action? Instead, why wouldn’t you base the philosophy of human action, on human action?

    What is the difference between, say, justifying something aprioristically, and simply stating that it appears that we are able to use description, deduction, induction, abduction given the amount of information available to us. But that deduction is possible only when describing constant relations?

    What is the difference between stating, the obvious falsehood, that categorical descriptions of human actions are axiomatic, as in mathematics, and therefore not bounded by reality, rather than that any general description of human actions is theoretical, parsimonious, with broad explanatory power, but remains bounded by reality?

    Why would one want to appeal to an authority using verbal contrivances, instead of honest descriptions of human actions? Why would you base the theoretical system upon which we analyze human actions on anything other than human actions? Especially when to do so you must misrepresent that which is ‘axiom-like’ but not axiomatic, as that which it is not?

    Unless you were trying to justify an appeal to an authority? To grant to that which is empirical, scientific and theoretical, the authoritative content of mathematics and logic, which because both are axiomatic, are fully tautological and unbounded by reality?

    Misesian reasoning, and rothbardian ethics, could be simply an intellectual error. Or it could be a dishonest use of obscurantism to hide the fact that human actions are observable. Even introspective actions are observable by the actor who makes them, and if communicated, observable by others. And as observable, those actions are empirical.

    Theories may be very hard or very weak. Some theories are very hard, in that under most conditions they are true. But because of time and space, no economic theories are axiomatic. They are bounded by reality. This does not mean that they need to be tested. That is a fallacy of positivism. It means that there are always the possibility of conditions under which they may or may not apply, for any given period of time. In axiomatic systems this is never true. That is what defines them as axiomatic.

    Operationalism solves the problem of reducing all statements to empirical (observable) and therefore sympathetically testable terms.

    Praxeology is either an empirical science for the purpose of determining the rationality of human actions, and the voluntary exchange of property, and therefore it is the test of moral action – or it is another of the many, many, cosmopolitan and continental fallacies.

    If you cannot explain human actions as human actions, then you are either unsure of what it is that you speak, or engaging in obscurantist deception. Continental and Cosmopolitan authors were (and are) trying to preserve traditional authority in the face of science, for the purpose of maintaining group homogeneity. We must treat their arguments as specious. Because they are.

    All we need is property rights, a contract for their fullest expression enforceable under the private, common, law, and the willingness to organize and use violence for the purpose of obtaining the opportunity to construct those property rights, contract, and private common law.

    Everything else is obscurant nonsense.

    Science won.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Propertarian Institute.

    Kiev.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-18 06:22:00 UTC

  • OCCAM’S RAZOR : ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN PROPERTY RIGHTS Under constructionism,

    OCCAM’S RAZOR : ARISTOCRATIC EGALITARIAN PROPERTY RIGHTS

    Under constructionism, you cannot rely upon an argument that you cannot construct. If you cannot construct apriorism, you do not understand it. If one does not understand a truth claim, he cannot claim it is true. Since one cannot construct apriorism, or at least, the matter is in deep dispute, you cannot rely upon it.

    If you cannot construct natural rights, you do not understand them. SInce one cannot construct natural rights, you cannot honestly rely upon it.

    I can construct an agreement for insuring one another’s property rights with any man who is willing and able. This is the source of property rights.

    It is the only source.

    And that is occam’s razor.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-16 10:22:00 UTC

  • YOURSELF OF APRIORISM AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY – JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY The que

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Outer-Limits-Reason-Mathematics/dp/0262019353CURE YOURSELF OF APRIORISM AND CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY – JOIN THE 21ST CENTURY

    The quest for liberty shouldn’t be a prisoner of magical thinking.

    Three great works on the current knowledge of the human mind and its limitations.

    1 – CONSCIOUSNESS

    http://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Brain-Deciphering-Codes-Thoughts-ebook/dp/B00DMCVXO0/

    2 – THE OUTER LIMITS OF REASON

    http://www.amazon.com/The-Outer-Limits-Reason-Mathematics/dp/0262019353

    3 – NATURAL HISTORY OF HUMAN THINKING

    http://www.amazon.com/Natural-History-Human-Thinking-ebook/dp/B00GG0C9WK/

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-16 07:48:00 UTC

  • ETHICAL REALISM: OPERATIONALISM, INSTRUMENTALISM, INTUITIONISM, EMPIRICISM *Or,

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/PROPERTARIAN ETHICAL REALISM: OPERATIONALISM, INSTRUMENTALISM, INTUITIONISM, EMPIRICISM

    *Or, how to cure yourself of continental and cosmopolitan obscurantism*

    We can only know enough to act, with the information at our disposal. We can only attest to the truth of statements that we can demonstrate operationally. By articulating a set of statements operationally, as actions in sequence, in time, we expose each statement to subjective tests of truth and rationality. As such, unless we have knowledge of construction, stated in operational language, for all concepts upon which we rely, we cannot honestly make truth claims. That this constraint is already held in the ethics of science, but not in ethics or politics, is the reason why false economic, political, legal, moral, and ethical arguments proliferate. There is no reason extant why we cannot constraint political speech to the same standards of truth as witness in court, or scientific testimony – other than to directly license deception. Our long semi-supernatural history with mathematics has provided false legitimacy to logic and argument for centuries. Operationalism ends this fallacy, and enables us to constrain politics just as we have constrained science, to a requirement for honest statements. It was not possible to levy this constraint until we understood that the unit of commensurability in all moral actions is that of property and fully informed, voluntary exchange. However, with that knowledge nothing prevents us from making universally moral and ethical statements, nor requiring individuals to speak in operational language in order to prevent deception and theft by obscurantist means.

    EMPIRICISM (VS RATIONALISM)

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

    OPERATIONALISM

    Only if we can describe a sequence of actions can we claim to know what it is that we say, and as such make truth claims about our statements.

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/operationalism/

    KNOWLEDGE OF USE VS KNOWLEDGE OF CONSTRUCTION

    Operationalism requires that we demonstrate knowledge of construction (causality) while knowledge of use merely demonstrates correlation

    http://www.propertarianism.com/2014/02/15/knowledge-knowlege-of-construction-vs-knowledge-of-use/

    CRITICAL RATIONALISM

    We may make many true statements in the construction of our theories, but whether or not we have made the most parsimonious statements with the greatest explanatory power that is ultimately possible (“The Absolute Truth”) is not available to us. There are no quantifiable measurable denominators to knowledge. The exploration of theories is not tautological, and therefore not logically closed.

    http://www.iep.utm.edu/cr-ratio/

    MATHEMATICAL INTUITIONISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/

    LOGICAL INTUITIONISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-intuitionistic/

    ETHICAL INTUITIONISM

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethical_intuitionism

    NATURALISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

    REALISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism/

    SCIENTIFIC REALISM

    http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

    THE LIMITS OF REASON

    https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17841838-the-outer-limits-of-reason

    OBSCURANTISM

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscurantism

    THE PRETENSE OF KNOWLEDGE

    http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-16 06:26:00 UTC

  • The Virtue Of Critical Rationalism

    [T]he chief personal virtue that Critical Rationalism bestows upon you, is the understanding that you never know the ultimate truth, you merely know enough to take action given the knowledge at your disposal, and only by our failures do we learn more about the truth, than we knew before – confirmation may be efficient and rewarding but it does not increase our competitive ability against each other, or against the forces of universe itself.

  • The Virtue Of Critical Rationalism

    [T]he chief personal virtue that Critical Rationalism bestows upon you, is the understanding that you never know the ultimate truth, you merely know enough to take action given the knowledge at your disposal, and only by our failures do we learn more about the truth, than we knew before – confirmation may be efficient and rewarding but it does not increase our competitive ability against each other, or against the forces of universe itself.

  • Review: Misreading Popper

    REVIEW OF POPPER BY WAY OF REVIEW OF ‘MISREADING POPPER’. Great book. Got a chance to read it this morning. THOUGHTS [I] do not know if it is fair to say that people misread popper, or that popper failed to make his case, but that he failed to reduce his ideas to general assertions that obviate the need to sympathetically (intuitively) agree with him in the first place in order to understand his case. Popper attempts to speak analytically at times, but he remains (as Alex Naraniecki has pointed out) a cosmopolitan author. The Popperian work that needs to be written is the one that this one ALMOST is, and that is to construct assertions that render the criticisms unnecessary. The historical parts of this book are exceptional and contextual, and in my view the best to date. A few of Rafe’s insights are in the book and they are insights that I learned from him years ago. The most important of which was the project to develop a philosophy of the social sciences, and the multiple authors who failed to succeed at that project, and the consequences for all of us, not so much scientifically, but politically an economically , precisely because they failed to succeed in that project. However, of those authors, Popper appears, perhaps not so well as Hayek did with law, but better than Mises with his pseudoscience of praxeology, to have come closer to articulating general universal statement of epistemology than anyone else. None the less, all of these authors failed to complete the project. (I think I understand why now.) So, Popper did not, like Hume (or Kant who I despise) take us across the finish line. And I suspect, that as Rafe points out in the book, it is because he did not lay out his project, because he was unsure of what it was. He wanted to criticize a prevailing trend, and he succeeded in that criticism. But a criticism in itself is not a positive assertion reducible to analytic terms describing an analogy to experience: a usable theory. CR/CP can be reduced to a list of assertions. Falsification is not the central proposition, but a contingent one, and as Rafe points out, an unfortunate choice of words. The scientific method can be generalized as the universal epistemological method, independent of purpose. And perhaps solve the problem of the social sciences. However, that project is incomplete. Given that Popper was largely correct, and that Hayek was largely correct, ( do not value the other authors terribly much), it should be possible to complete this project. But as yet, no one has. So again, I think it is an unjust burden to place the error of interpretation upon readers, and instead, to place the failure to organize, prosecute, and articulate the program and his solution to it. It is instead, proper I think, to state that Popper made correct assertions, in CR/CP, left his effort at falsification incomplete, and failed to complete the program he intuited but could not articulate. Most of this I believe, is a problem of language and culture. He had the right pieces. But our minds are structured by the language we use, and the culture that we live in, and he could no more escape his than we ours. Hopefully someone will write that book. Hopefully the person who writes that book will complete the program. As someone who tries to complete the overarching program myself – although I do not see it as Popperian but as a general problem of false distraction by extant platonic concepts, and the near magical results of the mathematical program despite its platonic concepts and language – legitimizing Popper is not terribly interesting to me. Nor is further promotion of his work as it stands. Nor is suppressing the absurdly persistent human cognitive bias toward justification. The matter at hand is to complete the research program. Hero worship is for priests. Some of us are out working in the mines. And the answer lies there not in hermeneutic interpretation of Popper’s extant works, or those of his successors. Great book. I wouldn’t have given it this much thought if it wasn’t. Cheers Curt Misreading Popper www.amazon.com

  • Review: Misreading Popper

    REVIEW OF POPPER BY WAY OF REVIEW OF ‘MISREADING POPPER’. Great book. Got a chance to read it this morning. THOUGHTS [I] do not know if it is fair to say that people misread popper, or that popper failed to make his case, but that he failed to reduce his ideas to general assertions that obviate the need to sympathetically (intuitively) agree with him in the first place in order to understand his case. Popper attempts to speak analytically at times, but he remains (as Alex Naraniecki has pointed out) a cosmopolitan author. The Popperian work that needs to be written is the one that this one ALMOST is, and that is to construct assertions that render the criticisms unnecessary. The historical parts of this book are exceptional and contextual, and in my view the best to date. A few of Rafe’s insights are in the book and they are insights that I learned from him years ago. The most important of which was the project to develop a philosophy of the social sciences, and the multiple authors who failed to succeed at that project, and the consequences for all of us, not so much scientifically, but politically an economically , precisely because they failed to succeed in that project. However, of those authors, Popper appears, perhaps not so well as Hayek did with law, but better than Mises with his pseudoscience of praxeology, to have come closer to articulating general universal statement of epistemology than anyone else. None the less, all of these authors failed to complete the project. (I think I understand why now.) So, Popper did not, like Hume (or Kant who I despise) take us across the finish line. And I suspect, that as Rafe points out in the book, it is because he did not lay out his project, because he was unsure of what it was. He wanted to criticize a prevailing trend, and he succeeded in that criticism. But a criticism in itself is not a positive assertion reducible to analytic terms describing an analogy to experience: a usable theory. CR/CP can be reduced to a list of assertions. Falsification is not the central proposition, but a contingent one, and as Rafe points out, an unfortunate choice of words. The scientific method can be generalized as the universal epistemological method, independent of purpose. And perhaps solve the problem of the social sciences. However, that project is incomplete. Given that Popper was largely correct, and that Hayek was largely correct, ( do not value the other authors terribly much), it should be possible to complete this project. But as yet, no one has. So again, I think it is an unjust burden to place the error of interpretation upon readers, and instead, to place the failure to organize, prosecute, and articulate the program and his solution to it. It is instead, proper I think, to state that Popper made correct assertions, in CR/CP, left his effort at falsification incomplete, and failed to complete the program he intuited but could not articulate. Most of this I believe, is a problem of language and culture. He had the right pieces. But our minds are structured by the language we use, and the culture that we live in, and he could no more escape his than we ours. Hopefully someone will write that book. Hopefully the person who writes that book will complete the program. As someone who tries to complete the overarching program myself – although I do not see it as Popperian but as a general problem of false distraction by extant platonic concepts, and the near magical results of the mathematical program despite its platonic concepts and language – legitimizing Popper is not terribly interesting to me. Nor is further promotion of his work as it stands. Nor is suppressing the absurdly persistent human cognitive bias toward justification. The matter at hand is to complete the research program. Hero worship is for priests. Some of us are out working in the mines. And the answer lies there not in hermeneutic interpretation of Popper’s extant works, or those of his successors. Great book. I wouldn’t have given it this much thought if it wasn’t. Cheers Curt Misreading Popper www.amazon.com

  • LIBERTY IS LIKE TRUTH Liberty is like truth : there is infinitely more of it tha

    LIBERTY IS LIKE TRUTH

    Liberty is like truth : there is infinitely more of it than you have, no matter how much you have at present. Liberty is not a state. It’s a pursuit.

    (Critical Rationalism may not be perfect but it will cure a lot of intellectual ills.)

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-15 07:54:00 UTC

  • THE VIRTUE OF CRITICAL RATIONALISM The chief personal virtue that Critical Ratio

    THE VIRTUE OF CRITICAL RATIONALISM

    The chief personal virtue that Critical Rationalism bestows upon you, is the understanding that you never know the ultimate truth, you merely know enough to take action given the knowledge at your disposal, and only by our failures do we learn more about the truth, than we knew before – confirmation may be efficient and rewarding but it does not increase our competitive ability against each other, or against the forces of universe itself.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-05-14 05:43:00 UTC