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Objectivist and Popperian Epistemology

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As to number one, Popper overturned more standard doctrines than Rand did. He overturned induction! Induction is a standard doctrine which Rand accepted, but Popper went further. And Popperian epistemology cannot compromise on this. If it accepted induction, it would immediately have to throw out 80% of its content (not all directly, but there'd be many implications and ramifications). You could still learn some things here and there, but, big picture, Popper would be wrong.

 

However, let's be careful about what induction is. Your statement is ambiguous and could be read as an incomplete version of Popper's epistemology. (A common thing I've run into in debates, btw, is that people trying to rescue induction from criticism change it to the point that they are advocating some subset of Popperian epistemology, without contradicting him, except they still want to call it "induction". You haven't done that yet but it's something to watch out for.)

 

A big issue is how we generalize ideasInduction traditionally says we generalize data sets to theories. It's trying to get knowledge directly from observation data. That does not work. What you talk about is different because the raw observation data gets mentally processed. The input to the generalizing is not raw anymore, it's been considered, interpreted, improved, etc... So far this is actually disagreeing with a lot of thinking about induction.

 

Also, Popper has nothing against general concepts. General principles or theories are great. We should try to get them. The issue is how we get them. Not directly from data! And also not by "generalizing" which is too vague. Rather, the way to get general concepts is to guess them (using creative, imaginative thinking), not to infer them from anything. If "generalizing" refers to any kind of inferring general theories from less general theories, then that would be along inductive lines and Popper-incompatible, and refuted by Popper (because, among other things, whatever your are inferring from, it's always logical compatible with infinitely many more general conclusions. so there is a big problem of how to select a conclusion. to begin with that would have to be specified). (And I think that this is the kind of thing you meant, though it didn't specify it, so I'm not sure.)

 

OK Back to Popper's approach: we can guess ideas that are more general than we have now. That's unproblematic as far as it goes (it's possible to do). The standard objection is that the guesses will be arbitrary, not knowledge. The solution to that is to use criticism to refute all arbitrary guesses, or any other kind of bad guess.

 

That might sound inconvenient but, like Rand says, you can automate a lot of your thinking so it becomes lightning fast to deal with many cases. (And if someone disagrees, and you want to have a critical discussion, then you can slow down and consider it more carefully. But most of the time there is no problem, and no need to slow down.)

 

So these Popperian guesses get a status of "not refuted, so far". They are fallible, conjectural knowledge. This raises many potential questions: is that good enough? is better possible? if we could do better, how exactly would it work and what would it be like? (Another standard claim of induction is that ideas created by induction have a high status. They are better than conjectural knowledge. I don't think claims like this hold up under scrutiny.) But I'll stop here for now.

 

 

(As a minor note, I normally prefer the term "idea" over "theory". It doesn't especially matter, except that sometimes people attach some special status or authority to the term "theory" as opposed to merely an "idea". I do not intend that.)

 

What induction supports the idea one would have to throw out 80%?

 

Popper overturned induction by enumeration. Rand did not subscribe to enumeration

Edited by Mikee
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We all know humans can think of ideas, guesses. That isn't problematic and requires no special theory.

Then what's all this talk about induction being impossible or untenable? I'm saying your basis for opposing induction isn't that it can't be done, it appears to be that your reason for finding it false is mostly that you can't imagine how induction could make sense besides enumeratively. Since enumerative induction is wrong, then induction is wrong. Use your creativity!

 

But the problem appears to be how does one think creatively? I would claim that induction *is* the act of creativity. In which case we're at the same place: how does anyone differentiate between effective and ineffective creativity? I suspect you just disagree about terminology, not content. So, can you clarify what you think Rand means by measurement omission at least, and we'll go from there?

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Induction doesn't mean thinking of any idea or guess by any method. It's a particular method of supposedly getting ideas. You reject "enumerative induction". OK. Can you please give an explanation of how the induction you want to advocate works, or a source?

 

If you define "induction" as "any creative thinking" then it wouldn't be refuted -- and would no longer clash with Popper ... or have anything even resembling its standard meaning. If you're going to redefine it so it has nothing to do with induction, you should use a different word.

 

I think the measurement omission issue is not important. I can concede it and it won't affect the rest of the discussion. I explained my position on it earlier: we do irrelevancy omission and not all irrelevant stuff is measurement. (So it's incomplete. Even if you take "measurement" non-literally as a bigger category, it's still incomplete.)

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Mikee,

 

as I understand Popper, he only criticizes enumerative induction, but doesn't appear to know or consider the theories of induction upheld by the likes of Bacon, Herschel, or Whewell.

 

I think you should study Popper a bit more before making claims like this. For example, if you look in the Name Index in Conjectures and Refutations, you could find out that Popper does know about, consider, and answer Bacon.

 

Also, if this is the standard of argument, where did Rand appear to know about or consider Popper's theories? But actually, serious question, if Popper is mistaken and Objectivism is better, then why are there no Objectivist refutations of Popper with reasonable quality? (I've read several attempts (like Dykes and Locke), but none of the authors actually understood Popper's positions. They kept attributing non-Popperian ideas to Popper and then arguing with those.)

 

As far as I can tell, Popper does not understand Bacon

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Induction doesn't mean thinking of any idea or guess by any method. It's a particular method of supposedly getting ideas. You reject "enumerative induction". OK. Can you please give an explanation of how the induction you want to advocate works, or a source?

I don't know what you mean by creative thinking. So, I don't know how to evaluate even induction as creative, except that it's literally creating an induction, creating an abstraction. I'm trying to understand what you're saying. Since creative thought is part of a Popperian method, what do I need to do in order to be thinking creatively in a valid way?  I'll get to how I think induction can work validly once I know what I'm even disagreeing with.

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The Popperian method involves no induction. And you don't have to think creatively in a "valid" way. You can think in any way. Arbitrariness is eliminated by criticism of ideas, not by a special method of thinking of ideas.

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The Popperian method involves no induction. And you don't have to think creatively in a "valid" way. You can think in any way. Arbitrariness is eliminated by criticism of ideas, not by a special method of thinking of ideas.

I get that there is no induction, but what is creative thinking! I don't know what that means.

 

I don't know what "criticism of ideas" is supposed to mean, either. How do I determine if what you say is able to eliminate arbitrariness? I presume by use of deduction, but how do I know if a premise of deduction is valid?

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Popper isn't even in the index of that book. If you're going to give me a reference, please tell me where is the quality Objectivist answer to Popper? (E.g. to his criticisms of induction and justificationism)?

 

Above you try to say Popper is scared of the word "Objective" before knowledge. I don't know why you say that. He titled a book "Objective Knowledge". The word "Objective" in the title is not in quotes.

 

You mention David Stove. According to this review,

 

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=D7A009A76B468E4AECF5BFAAD9FF861E.journals?fromPage=online&aid=7222460

 

Stove says that Popper would deny, "there has been a great accumulation of knowledge or growth of knowledge in the past four hundred years". Since that is not Popper's position (he'd take the opposite position), I'm concerned about the quality of Stove's position.

 

On Amazon, Rafe writes:

 

http://www.amazon.com/review/R31UWOS7LKZBHH/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0765800632&linkCode=&nodeID=&tag=

 

Stove and his claque have completely missed the point of Popper's philosophy and the way that it has sidelined the long-running and pointless academic obsession with knowledge as "justified true belief".

 

I've known Rafe for a long time and I've never seen him be significantly mistaken about this kind of issue. I would expect that if I read the book, I would reach a similar conclusion. But I am not interested in reading an attack on Popper which hasn't understood Popper. If you think it's good, please provide a little bit of evidence that this book (or you) has understood Popper's actual positions and critically addresses them. Or provide some other source, if there is one.

Curi,

1). I didnt say the book CATRIK addressed Popper. I said the issues you have (misunderstandings in my view) of Oist epistemology are dealt with in that book. In particular its discussion of measurement omission and the development of scientific concepts.

2). I assume a knowledge of Stove to get my meaning of "Objective" . The book is available free online:

"

The title of his most famous book in its English translation is a uniquely daring instance of the use of the old optimistic language of the historiography and philosophy of science (the rationalistic and authoritarian language, Lakatos and Feyerabend would say) to introduce a book which, by its actual contents, did far more than any other intellectual cause to discredit that language, and to inaugurate the irrationalist revolution in the historiography and philosophy of science. Thousands of readers have noticed this fact, so far as it concerns the use in that title of the word "logic"; and even Lakatos remarks on the "paradoxicality" [27] of the title in that respect. But my present concern is with the other part, because of the success-word it contains.

"The Logic of Scientific Discovery", indeed! There is scarcely a word in it, or in anything else Popper ever wrote, about scientific discovery, and the reason is as simple as it is sufficient. "Discovery" is a success-word, and of the strongest kind: it means the same as "discovery of what is true or of what exists". The history of science, therefore, to the extent that it has been a history of discovery---as it has been so markedly in the last four hundred years, for example---is a history of success. But that is not the way that Popper sees the history of science, far from it. For him the history of science is a succession of `problems', `conjectures and refutations', Socratic or Pre-Socratic dialogues, `critical discussions'. It is all talk. In this context any vivid reminder of an actual scientific discovery would be as out of place as a hippopotamus in a philosophy class. The only thing worse would be a reminder (though this would be too horrible) of what whig historiography used so often to bracket with scientific discoveries: inventions. Popper is perhaps the first person to see, in the glorious history of scientific discovery, nothing more productive and exhilarating than a huge W.E.A. philosophy class, and one which, to add to its charms, might go on forever. Does anyone suppose that Popper ever wrote or meant to write a book for which a non-misleading title would have been "The Logic of Scientific Discovery of Truth, or of what Exists"? Yet that is a purely analytic extension, only objectionable on aesthetic grounds, of his actual title. But clearly this title would belong, in the history of thought about science, in the heyday of the `whig supremacy', probably somewhere between J.S.Mill and Samuel Smiles, and it sounds a good deal more like the latter than the former. No, the right title for that book---and it is of some importance to realize that I am here only saying what everyone familiar with its contents has been at least half-conscious of all along---would have been "The `Logic' of Scientific `Discovery'". But of course that would have been too openly irrationalist. Better to let the word "discovery" stand, and trust to the contents of the book, rather than to quotation-marks in the title, to neutralize the unintended implication of success. Which duly happened, and never a word said. It is the word "knowledge", however, which was the target of Popper's most remarkable feat of neutralization. This word bulks large in his philosophy of science (much larger than "discovery"), and in recent years, in particular, the phrase "the growth of knowledge" has been a favorite with him and with those he has influenced most. Some people have professed to find a difficulty, indeed, in understanding how there can be a growth-of-knowledge and yet no accumulation-of-knowledge. But then some people cannot or will not understand the simplest thing, and we cannot afford to pause over them. Let us just ask, how does Popper use the word "knowledge"? Well, often enough, of course, like everyone else including our other authors, he uses it with its normal success-grammar. But when he wishes to give expression to his own philosophy of science he baldly neutralizes it. Scientific knowledge, he then tells us, is "conjectural knowledge". Nor is this shocking phrase a mere slip of the pen, which is what anywhere else it would be thought to be. On the contrary, no phrase is more central to Popper's philosophy of science, or more insisted upon by him. The phrase even furnishes, he believes, and as the title of one of his articles claims, nothing less than the "solution to the problem of induction" [28].

In one way this is true, and must be true, because any problem clearly must yield before some one who is prepared to treat language in the way Popper does. What problem could there be so hard as not to dissolve in a sufficiently strong solution of nonsense? And nonsense is what the phrase "conjectural knowledge" is: just like say, the phrase "a drawn game which was won". To say that something is known, or is an object of knowledge, implies that it is true, and known to be true. (Of course only `knowledge that' is in question here). To say of something that it is conjectural, on the other hand, implies that it is not known to be true. And this is all that needs to be said on the celebrated subject of "conjectural knowledge"; and is a great deal more than should need to be said."

http://ontology.buffalo.edu/stove/chapter-03.htm

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There is scarcely a word in it, or in anything else Popper ever wrote, about scientific discovery

 

Stuff like this really convinces me not to look at the book. This is ridiculous. Whether you agree with what Popper wrote about scientific discovery, or not, he still wrote it!

 

Taking up another issue from the quote: If someone would tell me the difference between conjectural knowledge and objectivist knowledge, that'd be great. Objectivism says that knowledge is fallible and contextual (omniscience is not the standard of knowledge). Popper's point with the qualifier "conjectural" is that it is fallible (and he also knows it is contextual). So why so much complaining about Popper's approach to knowledge? It doesn't look so terribly incompatible to me.

Edited by curi
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Curi, that link contains, while verbose, very little actual substance. He mostly assumes CR and say read this book.

This quote:

"Perhaps it all depends what you mean by knowledge. Popper for one did not deny that our knowledge grew over the centuries since 1580, and indeed in the last 50 years. I am not concerned to defend Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend, their admirers can speak for them."

Really gets at what I see as the problem. Youll notice he doesnt actually discuss what knowledge means. For good reason because Popper said:

"One should never get involved in verbal questions or questions of meaning,and never get interested in words. If challenged by the question of whether a word one uses really mans this or perhaps that ,then one should say"I dont know and im not interested in meanings"

Now, he does say this:

"David Stove then went on to lampoon Popper's theory of conjectural knowledge and the notion that theories arise as guesses rather than inductions. The debate over the nature of knowledge (conjectural objective knowledge versus justified true belief) is pivotal to the issue between Popper and Stove so this will have to be revisited at some length later on. "

The WHOLE point D Stove and I are making is that Popper's use of concepts like "knowledge", discovery, truth, objective, are rediculous given his over all context. The idea of "conjectural knowledge" is irrational because, like Stove pointed out in the quote I posted and Peikoff points out in ITOE, it is an instance of claiming x is not what x is. Like "dream reality", its a contradiction. All of this is addressed in detail in the Debunking Popper paper I posted.

Edited by Plasmatic
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"Conjectural knowledge" means non-omniscient knowledge. Objectivism uses the term "certain knowledge" and it also is non-omniscient knowledge. You tell me there is a big difference between the two. What is it?

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That is not what it means and I dont think Popper, if you could get him to answer a question of meaning, would agree. I say it tries to point out that "we never know what we are talking about", so we just guess arbitrarily at what something might be and then we call our guesses provisional "knowledge".

This all hinges on induction and causal expectation vs intuition and arbitrary guesses being obfuscated by the impossibility of precision without a meaning criteria.

Edited by Plasmatic
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So basically you reject Popper-2, as defined by you, and have nothing to say about Popper-1 as defined by me (who has studied Popper extensively, has had discussions with many of the best Popperians, etc).

 

What's the point?

 

Even if Popper was wrong and meant Popper-2, Popper-1, the thing I defined, could still be right and value.

 

Since we both seem to agree Popper-1 is a better set of ideas than Popper-2, why don't you wan to talk about it?

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So basically you reject Popper-2, as defined by you, and have nothing to say about Popper-1 as defined by me (who has studied Popper extensively, has had discussions with many of the best Popperians, etc).

What's the point?

Even if Popper was wrong and meant Popper-2, Popper-1, the thing I defined, could still be right and value.

Since we both seem to agree Popper-1 is a better set of ideas than Popper-2, why don't you wan to talk about it?

You assume I havent read Popper. I own just about all of his books and have read most all of each. Let me translate your statement for you from what I know Popper has said.

"Why wont you discuss my arbitrary definitions attributed to a philosopher who rejected defintion as such?"

"Accordingly, Popper refused to grant any philosophical value to definitions: "Definitions do not play any very important part in science.... Our 'scientific knowledge'... remains entirely unaffected if we eliminate all definitions" [OSE2 14]. "Definitions never give any factual knowledge about 'nature' or about the 'nature of things'" [C&R 20-21]. "Definitions.... are never really needed, and rarely of any use" [RASC xxxvi].

"

As quoted in Debunking Popper

Edited by Plasmatic
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Reading some books from a philosopher, and understanding them, are very different.

 

Is Popper-1 true or false? If false, why?

 

Is attacking Popper-2 a good reply to Popper-1?

 

Since we both agree that Popper-2 is false, why are you so interested in it?

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"Conjectural knowledge" means non-omniscient knowledge. Objectivism uses the term "certain knowledge" and it also is non-omniscient knowledge. You tell me there is a big difference between the two. What is it?

Conjectural per Merriam-Webster, is inference from defective or presumptive evidence. Objectivism uses the term knowledge as a relationship between the assertions and the evidence.

 

Ironically, you assert that reading a book and understanding it is very different.  Given your take on Objectivism's position about knowledge,

Objectivism says that knowledge is fallible and contextual (omniscience is not the standard of knowledge). Popper's point with the qualifier "conjectural" is that it is fallible (and he also knows it is contextual). So why so much complaining about Popper's approach to knowledge? It doesn't look so terribly incompatible to me.

it is conceptual consciousness that is fallible, not knowledge. A method to guide a fallible being in the quest for knowledge is what Objectivist Epistemology seeks to lay the groundwork for.

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Induction is generalizing from a finite number of observations to an infinite number of predictions.  I.e.: 

"I had ten fingers yesterday, I have ten fingers today= I will have ten fingers tomorrow morning. . ."

 

When Objectivists refer to 'induction' (since that word seems to be the cause of the trouble) they're referring to generalization; the act of using some specific and limited information to draw a generalization, which is nothing more than a bundle of predictions.

"All men are mortal" is based on empirical evidence (the mortality of almost all men, historically) and carries an implicit prediction (that mortality, continued) which COULD be invalidated at some point, but at the moment hasn't been.

"Socrates is a man" is based on empirical evidence (the correlation of all Socrates' known attributes to the known attributes of all men) and carries an implicit prediction (whatever attributes we discover about men will apply to Socrates) which is directly verifiable.

 

So that's what generalizations are and how they work; there can be no human thought without them because every concept you can name is based on generalizations.

 

That said, the Popperian method (observe, think about, criticize) already includes generalization under the label "think about" and I predict that, if you analyze that, you'll find that we actually are in agreement already.  =]

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You're being ambiguous about whether induction refers to any type of way of getting general ideas whatsoever (removing the substance to evade criticism), or only certain types such as generalizing from a finite number of observations (which is refuted).

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Both. 

It is the ONLY way of getting general ideas (because the alternative to induction is omniscience) and happens to generalize from finite observations.

such as generalizing from a finite number of observations (which is refuted).

 Are you sure it's been refuted?  In what ways?

 

This time I'm not asking rhetorically.  That is a generalization, right there, (measurement-omission) and I also think it's wrong.

 

Let's say we make three observations of entity or event A, and every time we do so we also observe that B is present.  If we then see B a fourth time, shouldn't we assume A (at least provisionally)?

Furthermore, if we were to see B an unspecified and infinite number of times, shouldn't we assume A unless/until we ever see B alone?

 

Isn't that generalization?

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Both. 

It is the ONLY way of getting general ideas (because the alternative to induction is omniscience) and happens to generalize from finite observations.

 Are you sure it's been refuted?  In what ways?

 

This time I'm not asking rhetorically.  That is a generalization, right there, (measurement-omission) and I also think it's wrong.

 

Let's say we make three observations of entity or event A, and every time we do so we also observe that B is present.  If we then see B a fourth time, shouldn't we assume A (at least provisionally)?

Furthermore, if we were to see B an unspecified and infinite number of times, shouldn't we assume A unless/until we ever see B alone?

 

Isn't that generalization?

 

No you should not assume that correlation implies causation!! Or even hints at it. It doesn't.

 

To think well, you have to come up with explanations about what is going on.

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No you should not assume that correlation implies causation!! Or even hints at it. It doesn't.

 

To think well, you have to come up with explanations about what is going on.

 Then how, exactly, do human infants ever learn that one side of their mother's face is connected to the other, that her voice correlates with the movement of her lips or that their crib still exists even when they aren't in it?

If you deny such generalizations then there is essentially no reason for any of us to have learned to speak, let alone ponder induction.

 

Correlation doesn't necessitate causation, but it sure as Hell implies it.

 

If you eat at a certain restaurant several times, and each time you do you're violently ill afterwards, you're going to suspect a causal relation there- and with good reason.  If our minds did not work thusly then our species would've gone extinct long ago, for an inability to avoid poisonous berries.

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