Curt Doolittle

Category: Epistemology and Method

  • On Realism

    [W]hat is the relationship between:

      and the combination of:

        when given

          In purest terms, of course, there are limits because of necessary information loss from the process of categorization. And it certainly appears that we can use science (categories and measurements and narratives that express causal relations that are allegories to experience) to understand almost everything we desire to = eventually. But despite apparent successes, the question is whether those limits are meaningful in the context of being a human: converting extra sensual perceptions to sense perceptions. Those limits can be meaningful in at least three dimensions: a) the scope of the patterns that we can identify (which I suspect we can use machines for), b) the period of those patterns, given that causality depends on arbitrary selection of periods of regularity, c) the number of axis of causal relations that we can understand. But since our problem is knowledge for the purpose of action in real time, not ‘knowledge’ as a static absolute, and it is our actions that are limited by our ignorance, and we would not be ‘human’ without those limits, the question always seems irrational. If we understand that all thought is time-contingent based upon the knowledge at our disposal, then it’s simply illogical to even try to represent knowledge as static ‘truths’. The question itself is irrational. If the standard is ‘enough perception that we can act to achieve our ends despite the limits of our minds’ that is very different from ‘we can understand the full set of causal relations by a process of representing measures of categories, and reducing them to expressions that are possible to articulate as a narrative.’ Since, we can test our theories, and science demands that we can both test (reproduce)( and determine the boundary conditions (falsify) our theories, using science and language to extend our sense perceptions, then we can test the correspondence of our understanding of the real world. It certainly appears that we can be successful in reducing the unobservable complexity of the real world into symbolic and linguistic representations that are sufficient allegories to experience, that we can understand and at at any scale in which we an define a scheme of measurement (sensing). And there is no reason at present to believe that there is some limit to this, other than our ability to marshall the physical resources to perform tests, or because performing those tests would violate the terms of cooperation with other humans (morality). And so, as Steven says above, theories are descriptive within the state of knowledge of the moment, if they correctly express the measurements and narratives of causal relations as we understand them at the moment, because they cannot exist without the context of the forms of measurement that we used to formulate them. Those statements in fact, correspond with reality at some level of precision. So the realist expectation is that we increasingly understand the complexity of reality, but may never fully achieve it. Although that imperfection may be meaningless for the purposes of action, as long as the allegory to experience is sufficient to produce the actions in question. The generational problem affecting the discipline of philosophy is that the metaphysical assumption that we can introspectively solve these problems without the help of science is as absurd as thinking that we can solve these problems without language. The discipline of Philosophy can help us construct analogies to experience so that we may consume those analogies and ‘understand’ them. But we cannot introspectively sense, perceive, and understand much outside of human scale, without the discipline of science. Hence not only is CR a form of Realism, but it is an improvement on Realism because it does not assume that representations are static.

        • On Realism

          [W]hat is the relationship between:

            and the combination of:

              when given

                In purest terms, of course, there are limits because of necessary information loss from the process of categorization. And it certainly appears that we can use science (categories and measurements and narratives that express causal relations that are allegories to experience) to understand almost everything we desire to = eventually. But despite apparent successes, the question is whether those limits are meaningful in the context of being a human: converting extra sensual perceptions to sense perceptions. Those limits can be meaningful in at least three dimensions: a) the scope of the patterns that we can identify (which I suspect we can use machines for), b) the period of those patterns, given that causality depends on arbitrary selection of periods of regularity, c) the number of axis of causal relations that we can understand. But since our problem is knowledge for the purpose of action in real time, not ‘knowledge’ as a static absolute, and it is our actions that are limited by our ignorance, and we would not be ‘human’ without those limits, the question always seems irrational. If we understand that all thought is time-contingent based upon the knowledge at our disposal, then it’s simply illogical to even try to represent knowledge as static ‘truths’. The question itself is irrational. If the standard is ‘enough perception that we can act to achieve our ends despite the limits of our minds’ that is very different from ‘we can understand the full set of causal relations by a process of representing measures of categories, and reducing them to expressions that are possible to articulate as a narrative.’ Since, we can test our theories, and science demands that we can both test (reproduce)( and determine the boundary conditions (falsify) our theories, using science and language to extend our sense perceptions, then we can test the correspondence of our understanding of the real world. It certainly appears that we can be successful in reducing the unobservable complexity of the real world into symbolic and linguistic representations that are sufficient allegories to experience, that we can understand and at at any scale in which we an define a scheme of measurement (sensing). And there is no reason at present to believe that there is some limit to this, other than our ability to marshall the physical resources to perform tests, or because performing those tests would violate the terms of cooperation with other humans (morality). And so, as Steven says above, theories are descriptive within the state of knowledge of the moment, if they correctly express the measurements and narratives of causal relations as we understand them at the moment, because they cannot exist without the context of the forms of measurement that we used to formulate them. Those statements in fact, correspond with reality at some level of precision. So the realist expectation is that we increasingly understand the complexity of reality, but may never fully achieve it. Although that imperfection may be meaningless for the purposes of action, as long as the allegory to experience is sufficient to produce the actions in question. The generational problem affecting the discipline of philosophy is that the metaphysical assumption that we can introspectively solve these problems without the help of science is as absurd as thinking that we can solve these problems without language. The discipline of Philosophy can help us construct analogies to experience so that we may consume those analogies and ‘understand’ them. But we cannot introspectively sense, perceive, and understand much outside of human scale, without the discipline of science. Hence not only is CR a form of Realism, but it is an improvement on Realism because it does not assume that representations are static.

              • (PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION) Someone smarter than I am will have t

                (PERSONAL: NOTE: EDITED FOR CLARIFICATION)

                Someone smarter than I am will have to take on the burden of creating a symbolic logic of action in disequilibrium. But I suspect that we already have it, in the scientific method. And that the attempts to conjoin formal logic of certainty with critical rationalism in science are operationally distinct fields.

                That isn’t saying it’s not possible. Its saying that we haven’t done it, and that Quine’s criticism of Popper is false.

                On the other hand, it is entirely possible that I don’t understand something, since I don’t have a lot of respect for formal logic as having application to actions. And, as a political economist, and philosopher of action, my priorities are different. SInce I don’t respect it, I haven’t spent much time studying it.

                It reminds me of war games and chess. They are, to some degree Ludic fallacies. Wars are won by precisely those criteria that war games and chess present as constants: informational asymmetry: deception, misinformation, and incomplete information, combined with differences in velocity and the concentration of forces. I gave up on both those enterprises for the same reason: as structured they are puzzles not problems.

                There is a difference between puzzles and problems. I view formal logic as an interesting puzzle, but political economy as a material problem.

                This is just a preference after all. I’m not making a moral argument. I’m simply taking the position that the physical sciences and formal logic are easier to solve than economic problems. The universe equilibrates. But human beings are RED QUEENS: we are always trying to outrun it by outwitting it, and that means we must seek to create disequilibria.

                That is a different way of saying that we must constantly battle ‘the dark forces of time and ignorance’ in order to stay alive on the universe’s treadmill by seeking and creating disequliibria both with nature and with each other.

                Certainty then, in any sense, despite the ease that would bring to our minds, by obviating the constant need for problem solving, would in fact, result in our extinction.

                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-14 11:17:00 UTC

              • (PERSONAL NOTE) First sketch: Contra Quine. The Physical Universe Observation (m

                (PERSONAL NOTE)

                First sketch:

                Contra Quine.

                The Physical Universe

                Observation (memory)

                Descriptive language

                The Scientific Method

                Measurement

                Mathematics

                Logic.

                Each of these is related to the one before it.

                Each loses information over the one before it.

                Rather than this hierarchy, they can be arranged on multiple axis describing various relations between them.

                But in every set of relations, information loss remains.

                Calculation in the broadest sense is impossible without information loss.

                The reason Popper’s CR is attractive is that it is a theory of action.

                It compensates for a cognitive bias all humans possess, which is that sense, perception, memory, and ‘calculation’ theorizing and planning are of necessity inductive processes, because we are always working against a kaleidic future whose state we can only approximate.

                Humans evolved to act with little information.

                When we extended our sense perception (observability) first with language and the narrative, we developed argument in the loosest terms. Second with quantitative measurements, we developed mathematics to work with objects whose scale was beyond our perception. Third we developed what we now call pure or symbolic logic to work with sets instead of quantities.

                But each of these systems launders information.

                Furthermore, we are confused by physics and fortunately countered by economics, because while the categories that we measure in the physical universe equilibrate, and we believed economies equilibrated because of prices. But it turns out, that because of flocking and schooling by induction-driven humans, that economies actually drive to disequilibrium, where they crash and people reorganize. Many small reorganizations are easy to absorb, and very large are not. ( Housing, Plague, trade routes, war. )

                There is a vast difference between symbolic logic and the logic of action for similar reasons of information loss.

                And this is the problem with both how popper argued in favor of CR in his era, and how Quine et all’s criticism is false.

                It is that the physical sciences snd the symbolic languages of logic and mathematics refer to constant categories that mirror the properties of the physical universe because ratios equilibrate in a manner identical to the physical universe wherever that universe exists independent of human action.

                But since humans act with limited information, their actions are fraught with error. In their inductions, in their, theories, in their actions and in their observations.

                The difference between poppers CR and Quine’s formal logic is that popper is inarticulately trying to give us direction given that we have made many errors of inclusion, exclusion and calculation in articulating a theory whatever its form, but our error is an error in the selection of information not an error in reasoning.

                Quines errors are many but I think they can be summed up as confusing an error in reasoning with errors of measurement, by confusing the content of statements with the categories that they are symbols of, because the simplistic set theory he is working with correlates highly with the physical universe because that universe equilibrates to a natural state, while the human race faces the unique challenge of creating disequilibria in the physical universe so that we can capture the energy available in the difference.

                I have always viewed formal logic as a tautological victorian parlor game.

                Someone smarter than i am will have to take on the burden of creating a smbolic logic of action in disequilibrium. But i suspect that we already have it, in the scientific method and that the attempts to conjoin formal logic of certainty and the critical rationalism in science are operationally distinct fields.

                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-14 08:12:00 UTC

              • DISTILLED

                http://www.criticalrationalism.net/2013/07/13/the-meta-problem-of-induction/INDUCTION DISTILLED

                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-13 06:35:00 UTC

              • HEIDEGGER NOTES Been working on Heidegger today. And I still don’t ‘grok it’. I

                HEIDEGGER NOTES

                Been working on Heidegger today. And I still don’t ‘grok it’. I understand the underlying problem that he is trying to solve, but I don’t understand his solution.

                If you can’t describe something as human actions, and if you can’t reduce something to analogy to experience, then I question whether you understand it, and whether it’s testable. And so far I can’t find a praxeological (neutral encyclopedic) set of definitions.

                I still think it’s just another zoroastrian revival movement. An attempt to argue that our senses are enough to serve our desires. A regressive attempt to return to primitivism, so that the senses and instincts alone allow us to abandon the problem of interpreting abstractions as analogies to experience.

                FROM HEIDEGGER FOR DUMMIES:

                “The Daseinic mechanism is Heidegger’s juvenile attempt at a grammatical and semantic transcendentalist trick in order to improperly elevate existence or BEING to the ontological status of a predicate via the gerundial phrase being there.”

                “Heidegger gambled [correctly] that the average reader, not expecting to be bamboozled, would, after a while forget the real underlying meaning of the 3rd-person continuous present fragment –*being* and gradually internalise *Being* and the gerundial *being there* as legitimate names for his human everyman’s existence. *Dasein* also means *Existence* in German) so bingo, the fact that existence is unpredicable would be forgotten by most the readers of *Being and Time,* after a chapter or two and for the purposes of his occult agenda it would be accepted into the philosophical lexicon as a fully fledged noun, which is the way he boldly treats it in his writings.

                Labouring under the same misaprehension of the Russian Name Worshipping Cult which holds that that if one names something it psychologically instantiates it, he smuggled *IS* and *Being* into his nominological vocabulary in the form of the gerundial noun phrase *being there* in order to avoid the more obvious existential Cartesian-style duality that the word *Being* implies* if it is bereft of an existential modality or modification to indicate, such as: *Adolf is being silly.*etc.

                Dasein (Being-There or Existence) is presented as a verbal noun – as a pseudo-entity which, as a noun, might be expected to have an existence – but it is an illusion, for it is no more than a BE word in drag – a 3rd-person conjugation or continuous *being* word in metaphysical sheep*s clothing. It must be remembered therefore that when he uses the word Dasein, he is misapplying it to substantiate or cognitively instantiate the verb being as a noun and thus when he talks of the: *Being of Dasein* he is really saying the *Being of Being.* [compare *the dancing of dancing.*]

                Ask yourself… “Is it the dancing Annabelle that exists – or *dancing?* Is it the being called Annabelle that exists, or the *Being* of the being called Annabelle?”

                —-

                SKEPTICISM

                I called Heidegger a philosophical date-rapist for this kind of sneaky stuff… But I keep open the possibility that I simply cannot conceive of world as he tries to communicate it. On the other hand, I think it’s also a possibility that Heidegger is a christian mystic doing a very artful job of creating a philosophical excuse for tyranny.

                All I see from the Postmodernists and the Continentals is an attempt to recreate the church by irrational rather than arational means. Religion may be arational because it is allegorical, but at least protestantism is not irrational, in the sense that it’s false. The difference between allegory and the pretense of rationality is the difference between not only truth and falsehood, but truth and deception.

                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-11 10:06:00 UTC

              • REASON AND FACT ARE INSUFFICIENT FOR PERSUASION: BECAUSE MYTH, MYSTICISM, AND FA

                REASON AND FACT ARE INSUFFICIENT FOR PERSUASION: BECAUSE MYTH, MYSTICISM, AND FALSEHOOD ARE MORE COMFORTABLE TRUTHS.

                (Profound)

                We can learn from history that allegorical mythology was converted to factual description by taking advantage of the desire for certainty, and inventing the scriptural religions – despite the obervable and logical contradiction of mystical statements with reality of experience.

                We can observe the continuing human desire for marxism, communism, socialism and redistributive social democracy despite its irrefutable logical impossibility, despite its universal failure, and despite our scientific knowledge of human behavior.

                We can observe that humans desire to believe the many contradictory falsehoods in Postmodern thought that form the current progressive ideology, and which is taught in our schools as the civic religion of the state.

                None if this should give us confidence that reason and fact will prevail, or that people desire reason and fact. Evidence is to the contrary.

                Progressivism, freudianism, postmodernism, and marxism are – as Hayek warned us – a new mysticism ushered in by Marx (1848) and Freud (1902AD), just as Zoroaster (~1800BC), Abraham (~1800BC), Jesus, Peter and Paul (<~50BC) ushered in ages of mysticism for political purposes.

                And we are, thanks to them, and thanks to human desires, despite our progress in the physical sciences, living in an age of regressive, pervasive, social mysticism.

                That is the evidence.

                Hayek suggested that future generations would see this as an age of mysticism. But there is little evidence of that in history. Instead, generations are perfectly happy to persist the social narrative and the scientific and economic narrative as if they were independent frames of reference for describing human history.

                Property, truth, and reason are aristocratic values and virtues, and their dominance in any culture the result of the organized application of violence by aristocrats to protect themselves from the ignorance, mysticism, and desires of the many.

                That humans benefit from aristocratic virtues and values is evidentiary. That they will voluntarily adopt aristocratic virtues and values is contrary to all evidence.

                And membership in aristocratic rationalism REQUIRES that we observe and respect that evidence.

                If you persist in the illusion that either the enlightenment vision of equality of ability limited only by will, or the postmodern vision of equality limited only by environment, then you are, in fact, non-rational, unscientific.

                Reason, property rights, and aristocratic virtues and values will exist only where a minority is willing to use violence to impose them on an unwilling population more desirous of mysticism and mental comfort than objective truth.

                Violence is the highest virtue, and the greatest asset one can possess. Everything else is just rhetorical justification to obtain property rights at a discount. And that is not aristocratic: it is fraud.

                Curt Doolittle

                Kiev

                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-10 04:53:00 UTC

              • PRAXEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION I don’t think philosophical pro

                PRAXEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS: THE PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION

                I don’t think philosophical problems are all that difficult. Any philosophical problem that is terribly difficult, is only difficult if you’re trying to justify a falsehood. 🙂 Praxeological analysis makes it VERY hard to justify a falsehood. As such, if you can’t describe something as human action, either you don’t understand it, or you’re trying to justify a falsehood. Most falsehoods are just attempts at theft by some sort of justification or deception. Otherwise we wouldn’t bother.

                Occam’s razor and all that… 🙂

                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-08 08:50:00 UTC

              • A SINGLE PRINCIPLE “….what is necessary for an apodictic political theory to w

                A SINGLE PRINCIPLE

                “….what is necessary for an apodictic political theory to work: All conclusions must spring from a single principle.” – Robert Murphy

                Yes. Well. I”ve done that. But I am not sure I like what it means. 🙂

                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-06 14:43:00 UTC

              • The Purpose Of Philosophy: in the Analytic, Naturalistic Philosophy of Action

                [T]he purpose of enlightenment program was isolate thought, morality and politics from the superstition of Magian religion. It was to launder superstition in favor of empirical reasoning in The analytic program’s objective was to incorporate the physical sciences into philosophy, but to hold onto the metaphysical program. The naturalistic, praxeological (action) and economic programs are attempting to launder the metaphysical program from philosophy. (Or that’s close enough for our purposes here.)

                  [T]he assumption in this line of reasoning, this set of priorities, is that with more knowledge we have more choices to determine how to make ourselves most happy through the accumulation of experiences. The other line of reasoning, is that human beings are able at present to be happy if they seek to obtain The problem is that humans demonstrate a preference for the consumption provided by the first, and demonstrate a preference to expend the intellectual and physical labor of the second. More accurately: they want others to expend the effort on the first, and to reserve for themselves the experiences of the second. We call conflict of ambitions a desire for ‘free riding’. In fact, we can argue that more human calculation is performed for the purpose of pursuing free riding than any other end except sex. Curt Doolittle. Kiev, Ukraine. (NOTE 1: “Calculation, in its broadest sense, refers to any comparison that permits a judgement. So while numeric computation is included in the definition of calculation, but so is ‘Where can I get a peanut butter sandwich?’ and ‘Do I like chocolate or vanilla ice cream more today?’. We use ‘calculation’ to distinguish simplistic processes from reasoning, which has a higher standard of demands – namely substitution and transformation.) (NOTE 2: This approach abandons the metaphysical program.)