–“Curt, I believe I already know the answer to this, but believe it to be valuable to your general audience nonetheless: what is your innovation on Popper in epistemology, science, and truth?”—Moritz Bierling
[G]REAT QUESTION. THANKS.
It’s very hard to do this question justice in a few thousand words. But tend to think of it as in the last century we had a lot of thinkers basically fail to complete the scientific method and thereby create a test of non-falseness like we do in law. And they couldn’t do it.
What I’ve done, because I”ve been lucky enough to spend most of my life working with “computable” systems – meaning **existentially possible to construct through a series of operations** is supply the habits of strict operational construction with requirements for existential possibiity, to the scientific method, and complete what those thinkers failed to discover.
POPPER
Popper applied Jewish critique, (criticism, which evolved into cultural marxism), to science, as “falsificationism”. Meaning, the way to avoid pseudoscience is to require that a statement be falsifiable.
He did this because pseudoscience was rapidly expanding under the popularity of authoritarian socialism, as much as because he was simply interested in philosophy. He was trying to preserve intellectual cosmopolitanism (Jewish diasporism), and this culminated in his work “The Open Society” which is what Soros uses as his ‘plan’.
Now, in his efforts to correct science, he developed a set of ideas that I will try to reduce to these:
1) Falsification (critique, criticism) vs justificationism (excuses)
2) Critical Rationalism: we can
3) Critical Preference: we cannot know which theory is more likely true. there is no method of decidability.
4) Verisimilitude through Problem->Theory->Test
5) That science, by verisimilitude, is conducted as a MORAL (social, normative) process, and that scientific discovery was accomplished by moral means.
BUT THIS IS THE PROBLEMUnempirical: his statements are logical not empirical, and he never did any research, nor has any been formally done.
Costs: he, like most philosophers, continues the Aristotelian tradition of ignoring costs. Costs provide us with information about which theories we can afford to pursue. Historically then, we can empirically demonstrate that man uses costs as methods of decidability.
Decidability: Costs provide decidability, for the simple reason that just as we pursue the least cost methods of research, nature evolves using the least cost method of evolution. It’s only humans that can choose to do the expensive thing and take a risk. Nature can’t do that. Nature is tightly deterministic. Man is only loosely deterministic. Because all of us guess a future and see if we can achieve it.
Falsification: Falsification is not very precise, and he did not see the dimensions. So he did not restate the scientific method as a series of dimensional tests equal to the dimensional tests of mathematics. So categories(identity), math(relations), logic (words/membership), operations (costs/existence), morality (choice/cooperation), and scope (full accounting) were each methods of falsification, that a scientific statement would have to pass.
Verisimilitude: Because costs do determine the progress of our investigations, our knowledge evolves just as organisms evolve, planets evolve, solar systems, galaxies, and the universe. What differs is the cost of inquiry in each culture. White people happen to have the lowest cost of inquiry because they have a high trust civilization where the norm of truth is highly defended as (nearly sacred) public property.
Physical absence vs Social presence of first causes. Unable to distinguish between the problem of instrumentation in the physical sciences in the absence of knowledge of first causes (‘nature’s choice’), versus the problem of subjective instrumentation in the social sciences, in the presence of first causes (sympathetic choice)
The Cycle
Problem -> Theory -> Test is actually … incomplete.
The correct structure is:
Perception(random) ->
…Free association (searching) ->
……Hypothesis (wayfinding) ->
………Criticism(test – individual investment) ->
…………Theory (recipe/route) ->
……………Social Criticism (common investment) ->
………………Law (exhaustion – return on investment) ->
…………………Survival (Perfect Parsimony – incorporation into norms) ->
……………………Tautology ( invisible – assumed world structure )
This long chain that represents the evolutionary survival of ideas, can be broken into these sections:
1 – Perception -> free association(searching) -> identity (opportunity)
2 – Question (Problem)
3 – Iterative Criticism ( Survival!!! )
………..wayfinding (criticism) / Hypothesis. Wayfinding is a form of criticizing an idea.
………..criticism / theory / personal use
………..testing / law / general use
………..recognition / survival / universal use
………..identity / tautology / integration into world view.
DIMENSIONS OF CRITICISM
The dimensions of criticism in pursuit of Determinism (Regularity, Predictability, “true”)
– categorical consistency (identity)
– internal consistency (logical) (mathematical/relations, linguistic/sets)
– external consistency (empirical correspondence)
– existential consistency (existential possibility)
– moral consistency (symmetric non imposition)
– scope consistency (full accounting, limits, parsimony)
If a statement (promises) or theory passes all of these tests it is very hard for it to still contain their opposites:
– error in its many forms
– bias – wishful thinking in its many forms.
– suggestion – pleading – guilting – shaming – complimenting
– obscurantism, pseudorationalism, pseudoscience – overloading
– lying and deceit in their many forms.
TRUTH
Truth is the most parsimonious operational description that we can give short of a tautology. In other words, truth is the search FOR TRUE NAMES.
MORE
I have also discussed truth in quite a bit of depth elsewhere so I don’t feel its important to discuss it here.
SUMMARY
So what I have attempted to do is ‘complete’ the scientific method, that popper started upon. It is not particular to science, but to any TESTIMONY we might attempt to give.
The consequence of doing so is that philosophy, morality, law, and science are now synonyms using the same language and structure.
Which kind of floored me actually.
Curt Doolittle
The Propertarian Institute