Form: Reply

—“Curt, what readings do you recommend for epistemology? Specifically, I want to source the work you put into testimonialism. And, can you add those to your reading list?”—

I relied on I think four different axis:

1) I consider Testimonialism a completion of the critical rationalism project. You can read popper for that. If you understand the philosophy of science and falsification vs justificationism that’s half the battle.

2) I came in via Locke/Weber/Mises/Rothbard/Hoppe’s attempt to reduce all moral questions to statements of property rights, and used Haidt’s research to tie it back to evolutionary biology. And that taught me that the only empirical social science was the common (natural) law.

3) I have had a long history of programming and an equally long-running issue with mathematical platonism and so I have spent a significant amount of time on the foundations (theory) of mathematics, and computer science

4) Hayek is the author that I most relate to. And he was the first that I know of to identify the shift from thinking in terms of forces, to electromagnetism, to information – not just in physics – but as the general model for all thought. This corresponds with the evolution of computer science out of mathematics (which is chiefly concerned with forces).

If you were to spend some time reading, my pieces in the FB group “scientific praxeology’ (which is a kind of slur against Misesians) cover the vast majority of the subject.

Here is how I look at it:

When we hit the late 1800’s we surpassed human scale in nearly everything we did, and because of the corrupt incentives provided by the developments of universal democracy, marxism/keynesianism, statistical analysis, Cantorian mathematics, and the distraction of the philosophical community as it tried to create a science out of the study of language, the movement that involve Poincare’, Brouwer, Bridgman, Popper, Hayek, and Mises (and others) including the attempt to create strict construction in law, all failed.

I think what I have tried (and I think succeeded) in accomplishing is the unification of science, philosophy/morality, and law into a single discipline (Testimonialism) by completing the failed project of the 20th century in defining the means of falsifying enough dimensions of reality that we can implement demands for truthful speech in law.

Everything else that I’ve done flows from this. The argumentative technique that you see my followers use, is an application of testimonialism (epistemology) and propertarianism (ethics) under what we consider to be a formal logic of natural law.

SOURCING.

Well I just gave you the sources, but you know, putting that rather obscure set of blocks together requires fairly deep knowledge of a set of complex disciplines, and it’s non trivial.

I think it’s better to read my writing and work backward from it rather than to read others and attempt to understand it.

(But ask Ayelam Valentine Agaliba, Bill Joslin, Josh Jeppson, William Butchman, Moritz Bierling, James Augustus Berens, Con Eli Khan, Ricky Saini … and the whole gang that comments less frequently. I mean, I don’t know how Eli Harman did it. He’s just intuited it I think. Josh says that if you have a grasp of any advanced science and the scientific methods used in it, then its a lot easier. But honestly, there is a reason no one did it before me….. I am not sure it was possible before. It was too much of a leap prior to widespread understanding of the problems of computer science vs mathematics.)

SEE THIS SERIES OF READINGS

https://www.facebook.com/groups/scientific.praxeology/permalink/750994611656577/