Source: Facebook

TESTIMONIALISM (COMPLETED CRITICAL RATIONALISM)

(second draft) (full cycle) (still needs third section)

[W]e both perceive, and remember stimuli, and construct and remember relations from that stimuli, and construct and remember layers upon layers of those relations.

The acts of planning, calculating, hypothesizing, searching, freely-associating, daydreaming, dreaming, and subconscious association attempt to imagine relations between the entire spectrum of memories we can store.

Once some (useful?) association is made (found) we must criticize it: determine if it withstands the scrutiny of other relations.

We determine if our imaginary relations survive (are truth candidates) by the act of testing those imagined relations to see if they fail or not – and therefore are worthy of our investment or not. We constantly compare the usefulness of the imagined relation with the cost of that imagined relation.

The return on those relations determines how excited we ‘feel’ about those relations and the energy expenditure we can risk in pursuit of those relations.

Returns can be both subjective and objective. Return can vary from mere satisfaction of curiosity, to personal gain, to a novel invention, to the total transformation of the world of man.

As the complexity of relations increases, the means by which we test our imagined relations increases. While we are sometimes able to test our imagined relations by means of introspection, at some point we lack sufficient information to perform such tests, and must resort to both more structured methods of testing, and restore to gaining additional information to see if the imagined relation survives criticism.

We perform this expansion of criticism until our estimation of the combination of risk,cost and reward favors conducting the final experiment of acting, rather than conducting either further criticism, or abandoning it as providing insufficient return.

[T]he discipline we call philosophy and the discipline we call science consist of a set of methods (processes) which (a)philosophical science, (b)the social sciences, and (c)the physical sciences, use to launder existential impossibility, limitlessness, error, bias, imaginary content, wishful thinking, deception, and (objective) immorality (in the domain of the social sciences) from our testimony (speech).

This laundering is achieved by a set of methodological criticisms addressing increasing levels of complexity of which philosophical science consists of the full set of criticisms, social science a subset of those criticisms, and physical science yet another a subset of those criticisms.

Those criticisms consist of tests of: Identity, Internal Consistency, External Correspondence, Existential Possibility (Operationalism), Full Accounting (against selection bias), Parsimony (limits), and voluntary transfer (objective morality).”