Source: Facebook

(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.