Curt Doolittle

Theme: Truth

  • PHILOSOPHY AND IDEOLOGY: TRUTH IS ENOUGH. The Job of Scientists, Philosophers, I

    PHILOSOPHY AND IDEOLOGY: TRUTH IS ENOUGH.

    The Job of Scientists, Philosophers, Ideologists, Activists and Priests.

    I. Science-> II. Philosophy-> III. Ideology -> IV. Religion

    Science is a purely descriptive discipline. Philosophy consists of constructing true statements that assist us in ethical action. ideology consists of inspirations to act to obtain power, and requires only the minimum truth necessary to obtain power. Religion consists of rituals and myths that bind us together pre-cognitively, and in religion, true propositions are unnecessary – and largely undesirable.

    Therefore, truth content of each discipline: science, philosophy, ideology and religion – varies significantly.

    ***Now, if we merely sought discretionary power as do most, then it wouldn’t matter if our arguments were constructed scientifically. But since we are proposing an order that lacks discretionary authority, and where discretionary authority is prohibited, and where economic prosperity is the promised common good, then ideas and actions must correspond with objective reality rather than subjective command, law must be rationally calculable, and truth (correspondence with reality) is required of us. Truth is the only ‘rule’ that we can ‘rule’ by.***

    This does put us at an ideological disadvantage: our messages are harder to convey. We promise no free rides. Offer no eternity. No certainty.

    But that said, for some minority of us, truth, liberty, prosperity, and reality are desirable enough for us to act, and act with the threat of violence, to obtain them.

    Our ideology then, consists of the truth, the promise of liberty and prosperity, the organized application of violence to obtain them, and the moral justification whereby moral men feel that their actions are morally sanctioned.

    Therefore, the job of a philosopher, like myself, is to produce the truth. The job of ideologists, is to provide moral sanction. The job of activists, is to distribute moral sanctions. The job of shamans is to bind us together through shared experience, ritual and myth.

    Curt Doolittle

    The Philosophy of Aristocracy

    The Propertarian Institute

    Kiev, Ukraine (writing from L’viv)

    🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-28 04:35:00 UTC

  • Science Vs Belief – Institutions Of Law Vs Religions And Cults

    [Y]eah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions. Just how it is.

  • Science Vs Belief – Institutions Of Law Vs Religions And Cults

    [Y]eah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions. Just how it is.

  • (PRIVATE ON TRUTH AND TESTIMONY) Archive for reference. Hmmm…. number of rando

    (PRIVATE ON TRUTH AND TESTIMONY) Archive for reference.

    Hmmm…. number of random thoughts on this paper….

    1) The mechanism that serves to help us identify similarities is not rational, but intuitive – pre-rational (System 1) that performs searches of our memories. The mechanism that we use to deduce the reason for the similarities we have intuited, is rational (System 2). Critical observations from System 2, once committed to memory, then add to System 1.

    I can’t think of anything that doesn’t follow the process of System 2 instructing(loading) System 1 “searches for patterns.” But the operation of System 1 (intuition) is invisible to us. Largely I believe, we verbally justify the instruction of intuition as the application of reason – but that is impossible as far as I know.

    2) Once we have constructed a theory through this combination of intuition(searching) and direction (reason), we then start to try to confirm this theory and falsify it. I think the major difference between individual behavior comes from whether we search for refutations, or confirmations, and how exhaustively (depth+breadth search) we attempt to refute it.

    3) Now, it’s possible to state those two paragraphs above (1+2) in language that is more precise, albeit using a lot more terminology, but as far as I know, that is what actually occurs when we hypothesize and test.

    4) In the spectrum deduction (sufficient information), induction (insufficient information), and abduction(sparse information), only deductions can be claimed to be true. That does not mean that we cannot guess – only that we cannot claim that our guesses are true. Long division works by the process of organized guessing. Repeating sequences are proof that the information is not present to produce an information without the arbitrary decision of choosing a limit to the precision of the decimal expansion. So the information to conduct division in the absence of contextual precision still faces the problem of sufficient determination of truth. This problem is also true of all statements about the dimensions of circles. But it is not true of the properties of rectangles. Without context we possess insufficient information to make a deduction without the arbitrary introduction of human choice to limit precision.

    5) —“We have just seen that universal statements cannot be justified or confirmed by observation-statements.”—

    Isn’t this just a verbalism? When we communicate we reduce reality to a set of selected symbols (words) that reduce the information content to communicable and useful form that humans can make use of. We make expressions in a context, just as we make measurements in a context. We can never make universal statements that are non-tautological for this reason. Non-tautological, True statements REQUIRE the absence of information. No? Deductive (tautological) answers are proofs. Truth requires testimony that the work done exhausts the standards of demonstration available to us. Ultimate truth is never attainable any more than an infinite limit is attainable. At the point the ultimate truth, or limit is reached, we achieve the construction of a tautology, not a testimony to the exhaustive proof of one’s statements given currently available knowledge.

    More in a bit.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 06:25:00 UTC

  • SCIENCE VS BELIEF – INSTITUTIONS OF LAW VS RELIGIONS AND CULTS Yeah…. I don’t

    SCIENCE VS BELIEF – INSTITUTIONS OF LAW VS RELIGIONS AND CULTS

    Yeah…. I don’t make “should” or “belief” arguments. Sorry. If you wanna make people believe something, start a religion or cult like Rothbard did. If you want to create a stateless, private or anarchic polity, then you have to eliminate rational demand for the services provided by the state. To do that requires a high trust society. And the evidence is universally in my favor that it does. So the burden on the lunatic fringe, is to demonstrate that people will rationally join a low trust polity in the absence of strong central authority that suppresses retribution for unethical, immoral and conspiratorial actions. Because human beings demonstrate that they will commit acts of violence in retribution for unethical, immoral, and conspiratorial actions, just like they will for criminal actions.

    Just how it is. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-27 05:50:00 UTC

  • A HIGHER STANDARD OF TRUTH (reposted for archival purposes) I’m arguing about ne

    A HIGHER STANDARD OF TRUTH

    (reposted for archival purposes)

    I’m arguing about necessary properties of truth (knowledge claims) not mere utility (correspondence), which are two different things. Determining Truth is a matter of testing our knowledge of use (external correspondence), of knowledge of internal consistency, and knowledge of construction. I don’t think I’m really addressing the problem of hypothesis creation (conjecture). I’m addressing the problem of truth. I think ultimate truth is addressed already: unknowable, ultimately parsimonious, proof of knowledge of correspondence, consistency and construction, for any given theoretical, non-tautological statement. Since we cannot know this we can only testify to the truth of the most currently most parsimonious, proof of knowledge, correspondence, consistency and construction for any given theoretical, non-tautological statement. These two definitions are often conflated: truth we can currently testify to, and the truth we aspire to one day testify to.

    For me to succeed in quashing postmodernism, mysticism, and even ‘continental and cosmopolitan rationalist empty verbalisms’ in political and legal speech, then I have to get to the (unsolved) nature of truth. Which I think I have. (above)

    All other variations on truth are simply analogies for proofs that make use of fewer properties of necessary truth. LIke “numbers” we use the word “truth”, imprecisely, as an analogy in multiple contexts.

    Only one ‘truth’ can be demonstrated to exist: performative truth. Everything else is a rough analogy. And almost all is proof not truth. And most of those proofs are limited to very narrow conditions.

    I find it terribly interesting that the problem of truth was not solved, despite all the work on it. And the reason it was not solved, is that all statements are ethically contingent. And that is a troublesome thing to tell a scientist or logician trying to escape the false ethics of religious mysticism and that tradition, rather than the objective ethics and morality of propertarianism

    Maybe this is a greater change in conventional thought than appears to me. I know that for mathematicians the idea that they’re utilitarian traditions and contrivances are unethical (untrue) appears absurd. But I’m sure to most critical rationalists, the idea of using analogies as truth claims as immoral and unethical might seem absurdly burdensome. And I know that for Austrians, the idea that apriorism is immoral and unethical is not only absurd but extremely burdensome. I know that for average speakers, the fact that using the word “is” for other than existence, set membership or location (specifically for properties) is extremely cognitively burdensome.

    But there is a vast difference between internal dialog, and public speech. And while internal dialog can suffice for utilitarian purposes, and places no criminal, ethical or moral constraint upon others, the moment we speak , write or publish to others, we have entered into an ethical and moral realm, and are engaged in unethical and immoral action if we make truth claims that we cannot demonstrate we have the knowledge to make. If we must state the truth in public, or hypothesis in public, or rumour in public, or myth in public, is it not immoral and unethical to misrepresent one’s statement?

    Only under very rare conditions may we make truth claims. In the most part we are communicating rough analogies, others we are hypothesizing, and rarely are we engaged theorizing – and almost never are we capable of making truth claims.

    Under performative truth, we are making a promise. That promise is implied. Most of the time, we are not making a truth claim. But an hypothetical claim. And that is implied too. The question is, do we know when we are doing one or the other.

    And I think not.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-26 04:22:00 UTC

  • ALL INCREASE IN THE INTEREST IN LIBERTY HAS BEEN IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: BECAUS

    ALL INCREASE IN THE INTEREST IN LIBERTY HAS BEEN IN CLASSICAL LIBERALISM: BECAUSE IT”S MORAL, AND LIBERTINISM (ROTHBARDIANISM) ISN’T

    (reposted from a comment to Boettke)

    As far as I know, all movement toward the libertarian spectrum over the past decade has been toward the Classical Liberal values, which are of psychological and normative construction, rather than toward the anarchic, economic and empirical.

    Morals move political orders, not utility. If utility moved political orders the protestant countries would have spent, not engaged in austerity. But humans will suffer great losses to punish the immoral. We could not have evolved as a species otherwise.

    Economic universalism was one thing under homogenous polities. But, particularly after Rawls, and the postmodern assault on the west, academia, in no small part because it appealed to the new broader customer base, and its willingness to pay for access to universities, proposed universal morality instead of recognizing that moral codes reflect reproductive strategies, and that no universal moral code is expressible in politics across morally heterogeneous peoples. Not unless we invert Pareto and simply agree to punish the most moral people and fund the least moral peoples. (Which is what we do, which is why redistribution is dysgenic, and politically factionalizing.)

    So until economics re-incorporates morality into the study of political economy, economics (particularly the aggregation ‘dishonest socialism’ of the Keynesians) will remain a tool of state expansion and friction creation rather than a ‘science’ which corresponds to long term reality.

    We do what we measure. A fortune 1000 company can burn its brand value for short term profits. A people an burn its normative capital for short term consumption. But in the end, the ability both the brand and the polity to survive competition long term is harmed by that consumption of accumulated capital.

    We have to put morality back into economics.

    This is what Mises got wrong – or at least, never managed to get right.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-24 04:17:00 UTC

  • IN SEARCH OF APHORISMS – CREATING AND REPEATING ORDERED SETS. It is incredibly d

    IN SEARCH OF APHORISMS – CREATING AND REPEATING ORDERED SETS.

    It is incredibly difficult to take novel ideas, especially revolutionary ideas, and reduce them from intuitions, to analogies, to causal relations, to communicable narratives, to something close to an aphorism that is self evident and easily digestible by its mere construction as overlapping sets.

    One technique I’ve used extensively is to try to articulate and enumerate, all ideas as a spectrum rather than as an ‘ideal type’ – a single term. This tends to solve most problems of conveying novel or complex ideas. It’s more burdensome to write and argue, because it requires a lot of repetition of sequences, but it’s much more effective to compare points on a line (ordered set), with points on another line (ordered set), than to rely upon less precise terminological ‘blobs’ open wide to interpretation – which is what most ideal types are: uselessly imprecise.

    When comparing concepts you can generally talk in supply-demand curves, even if the reader doesn’t understand that’s what you’re doing. But he can understand the intersection of two concepts using two lines, arcs, or distributions as CAUSAL rather than as analogistic, if you give him the tools to.

    It’s just brutally hard work. I’ve been sort of keeping track and it takes me at least ten attempts at writing to do it, sometimes many more.

    If you write empathically that’s one thing. But if you’re whole endeavor is to not rely on intuition, then you have to write in some way that contains information without relying on experience external to the argument. The relationship between members of an ordered set (sequence of term) tends to do that for you. Comparing two or more ordered sets is much more effective than any narrative. The mind does the work for us, that reason would have to do otherwise.

    Back to breaking verbal rocks…. 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-22 04:59:00 UTC

  • CONSTRUCTION VS ANALOGY = TRUTH VS COMMUNICATION If you haven’t stated a constru

    CONSTRUCTION VS ANALOGY = TRUTH VS COMMUNICATION

    If you haven’t stated a construction, even if you stated it as a function (summary) then you have merely stated an analogy. An analogy is merely that and nothing more. Analogies are useful for the purpose of communication. They function as useful means of transferring properties between entities. However, if you cant state your analogy as a construction, then you cannot make a truth claim about it, since you cannot demonstrate that you possess the knowledge that you claim to. Analogies are informative but they are not equivalent to truth claims. Truth, as in performative truth: your testimony, requires that you possess knowledge of construction. Otherwise you’re just communicating your level of understanding, not truth.

    People should ask a lot more questions, and fewer statements. This is the theory of performative truth. We should assume that the majority of statements are merely questions, structured as statements, for the purpose of brevity, and avoiding the accusatory implications of declarations that are an unfortunate and distorting challenge to all debates.

    ( I need to write a bit more about the problem of ‘good manners’ in debate (avoiding accusation and blame) as an accidental cause of a great deal of obscurantism. )

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-22 04:31:00 UTC

  • THINKING (SEARCHING) VS REASON AND INDUCTION (from elsewhere) Matt Dioquardi is

    THINKING (SEARCHING) VS REASON AND INDUCTION

    (from elsewhere)

    Matt Dioquardi is very clear here, and I wanted to save this quote for my own reference. But it’s so good it’s worth sharing.

    For those who follow science more so than philosophy, you might note that David Miller’s “thinking” is equivalent to Kahneman’s “searching” with “System 1”.

    While in any deduction the information must be present in the extant statements, Induction is logically nonsensical since the information cannot be present for it to function. But we do add information to any question when we perform our acts of free association. This action is not rational, as in “System 2” thinking, but we do intuitionistic searching for possible relationships with “System 1” thinking. To the computer-science savvy mind, this is an obvious process we are familiar with. But I suspect prior generations conflated the two or gave precedence to reason which is subject to reflection (we can observe) over searching (intuition) which is not subject to reflection (we can’t observe it). When the evidence is now, that we do a lot more searching (its faster) than we do reasoning (it’s slow and expensive).

    QUOTE:

    —“One could argue that we need a manner of going from particular data points to a general theory — and that this is the problem of induction. One could simply say, I don’t understand how we do this, even though we do this. There’s a fine line where someone could *reject* induction philosophically, but still argue for it methodologically … the problem is then perhaps formulated as trying to explain why we methodologically accept induction, but reject it philosophically … something like that …

    Or one could argue that even once we have a theory, we need some type of confirmation of that theory, and so this is the problem of induction.

    There’s no end to the manner in which one can argue we still have a problem here — and so we still need to find a solution. I’m not clear on this, but I think there are ways in which Bayesianism can be formulated so that it can be argued that it makes no use of induction — though I’m suspicious about this claim.

    But putting all this aside, I think the methodology Popper presents, if accepted, simply does away with these problems. They cease to exist. So there is no problem of induction. There’s no inductivist problem. Induction is simply misguided from the get go. It posits a *justificationist* requirement where one is never needed.

    Of course, if one wants to argue Popper is wrong, then that’s a different issue …

    Even on the issue of “problem finding”, I think what David Miller states in his essay, “Do We Reason When We Think We Reason, or Do We Think?” might be relevant. He addresses the issue of schools that want to teach “critical thinking”: “— Matt Dioguardi

    LINK: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/philosophy/people/associates/miller/lfd-.pdf

    As a now-committed operationalist, I have some difficulty with Miller’s approach. Formal logic is not operational. But he seems to consistently come to the correct conclusions. And this paper is evidence of that fact.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-06-21 03:49:00 UTC