Category: Epistemology and Method

THE SCOPE OF CRITICAL EPISTEMOLOGY

(testimonialism, propertarianism, nomocracy, and aristocratic egalitarianism, in a nutshell)

Truth:

We can never know we speak the truth, only if we speak truthfully, and then only by performing due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, and deceit.

Epistemology:

We can freely associate and develop an hypothesis. The method by which we arrive at the hypothesis does not influence the truth of our guess. Those hypotheses that survive our due diligence against error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, and deceit, may be warrantied to one another as theories. Those theories that survive criticism against error, bias, wishful thinking and deceit, are truth candidates. Those that survive enduringly we call ‘laws’. All knowledge follows this evolution: Free association, hypothesis, theory, law.

Ethics:

We cannot know what is a good action, only what is a bad action. A bad action is one that imposes costs. The only way not to impose costs is to limit one’s actions to productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer free of the external imposition of costs upon others.

Law:

Create negative law empirically by the resolution of disputes, and incrementally evolve the suppression of parasitism, leaving only new innovations in parasitism, and the remaining positive actions available.

Liberty:

Suppress corruption and involuntary transfer and only liberty remains.

Rule:

We cannot know good rule except in distant retrospect, we can only know bad rule. The best rule then is that no man rule, and we rule by law. Law does not ask us to be good. It demands only that we are not bad.

Politics:

We cannot know what is good, only what we are willing to pay for. The majority cannot know what is good, only what is bad. Ego: Transform democratic majority assent into legal (suit) minority dissent in producing commons. Anything that is both willingly paid for and survives the test of badness or falseness, is the only possible good.

Religion:

We cannot know what religions are good, only those that are bad. Those that are bad are not compatible with natural and physical law. Those that are compatible are the only religions that remain.

Universal:

The only way to know what to do unto one’s neighbor is to not do that which you would not want done unto you.