Category: Epistemology and Method

THERE ARE STILL POOR MISGUIDED LIBERTINES OUT THERE

—I find it interesting that Objectivists claim that all knowledge is empirical (a performative contradiction)—Daniel Rothschild

This is a common misinterpretation of the word ’empirical’. When someone says all knowledge is empirical, it means everything we remember is constructed from the senses. As far as I know very few philosophers dispute this. So, ’empirical’ in the sciences means observable. And to prevent error, by extension it means only “consistently observable, measurable, and recordable”. Consistent correspondence with reality.

The question of empiricism has largely been one of whether the apriori holds the same utility as the empirical. And for the purpose of hypothesis generation it seems to. For the purpose of deduction it appears not, since in all but reductio examples, we can construct no unlimited propositions of reality that we can as in, say, mathematics, which must introduce scale (‘the axiom of choice”) and time in order to restore correspondence. But because of the determinism of the universe it’s relatively scale independent for the purposes of human action and cognition.

So in this sense, neither the empirical nor the aprior allow for deduction of apodeitically certain (axiomatic) answers. Instead, both the empirical and the apriori allow us to construct hypotheses which we can criticize and see if they survive as truth candidates.

Although, I didn’t know the philosophers of the libertarian era personally (I came into this work a bit late) the last century had a great deal of difficulty with philosophy, and libertarians were not immune to it. Perhaps less immune to it.

When making such claims as the libertarians do, most of it is not defensible. I won’t go into the history of it here, but they were trying to construct some equivalent to talmudic law – and failed. Law is justificationary, contractual, and deductive – . Truth is critical and evolutionary – it survives criticism, and we warrant its survival of criticism when we make a promise of truth claim.