Why They Fear Us

I don't know if you noticed or care but I found it amusing that post # 187 where he claims to have a bug free mind contained a spelling error.

Quine's concept results in essentially a form of relativism that denies that any one theory can be superior or more accurate than another. It amounts to an arbitrary and slothful epistemological abdication of man's evident capacity to fathom and control the external world.

The recognition of the problem of under-determination does not in the the least "deny that one theory can be superior or more accurate than another".

It does not put an end to, or even damage, critical thinking to recognize that our data and our reasoning is potentially fallible, and finite in scope, and to take that into account--because it happens to be true. And perceptions that happen to be true are more likely to yield useful results than perceptions that happen to be false.

It is in no small measure due to this problem of underdetermination that we have taken, at the end of the twentieth century, so enthusiastically to Karl Popper's notion of falsifiability as the central correct criteria to apply in our critical analyses of scientific evidence and theories. Proof is beyond our resources, but falsifiability makes useful sense as a major criteria for judging scientific theses. Or, putting it another way--falsifiability lets us evaluate theses usefully, in the face of under-determination. We, in fact, apply a very refined set of criteria in critically judging scientific evidence and theories, none of which is the least deterred by the painfully obvious fact of underdetermination. Simply because it is not a proof, and is fallable, does not mean it is irrational, or unproductive by any means. This is an extremely parocial, and unlikely role you've assigned to logic, to suggest we are bereft of wits unless we cast every attempt at thinking into a formal attempt at Aristotalian, deductive proof, and abandon the field if there is no proof to be found. This is a fairy tale, not a reasonable theory about how scientific, or, for that matter, any critical reasoning can or should operate.

Odd that we should think we can make progress this ragtag way, despite the conspicuous lack of proof of anything, eh? Or do you think physics has backslid greatly from the underdetermination of the law of gravity that has been flagrantly extant for the last 300 years?

Hitler? AFAIK, he was a theist all his life.

He was educated at a Benedictine school, sang in a catholic choir, and had thought for a while, when young, to become a catholic priest. It has been frequently argued that he was, at the end, a theist, but the evidence is thin. He did want to replace both the catholic and protestant churches in Germany with a volk-church, but the suggestion that this was to have been a non-christian volk-church is, at best, unsupported and unlikely.

I will even try to answer your current question, but first, you must answer a question for me. What do you believe the purpose of your life is?

That which I choose of my own free will.

If I answer your question the way you answered mine, I think you will be very critical of my answer. The question is, what have you chosen, and why, unless you mean, a human life has no purpose or that it is totally arbitrary. If that is what you mean, that is where we will have to begin.

If life has no purpose, there is no need for morality at all. If life has no purpose, it does not matter what you do. Steal all you want. Values, especially moral values, presuppose some goal or purpose or objective. That which supports or promotes that purpose is good, and that which denies or prevents the purpose is bad. But first, the objective must be defined.

If you like, I will tell you what the purpose of life is, but I would rather you told me. It will be based on what you have discovered about your own nature by two things you observe: introspectively about your own conscious nature, and extrospectively, about the nature of the world you live in, including other people.

Hank

Proof is beyond our resources ...

Really?

So you are still not sure heavier-than-air flight is possible, or that painless surgery is possible, or that electricity can be produced by moving a magnet in a coil of wire, or, for that matter, that the earth is not flat, since nothing can proved. (These are all things "scientists" seriously debated and thought "scientifically unprovable," at one time.)

The idea that everything must be proved before anything can be proved is simply stupid. Proof is ubiquitous, and the supposition that proof is not possible comes from careless observation (and a perverse desire to undercut human rationality).

And, by the way, the principle of falsifiability is proof. Most people do not understand the nature of the concept at all.

Hank

Fantastic question...

I thought it might interest you.

...I will surely be thinking about it ...So, stand by ...

I certainly shall, looking forward to your always interesting comments.

Enjoy your weekend adventure!

Hank

I don't know if you noticed or care but I found it amusing that post # 187 where he claims to have a bug free mind contained a spelling error.

I missed that. Thanks for the New Year's grin.

The problem is, of course, that an objectivist demands that his mind be bug free in order to think about a problem because his rational and cognative powers give him ultimate reality.

Unfortunately for most theists, and especially for "Bible Believing" Christians, we are often too slow to admit our own cognative weakness. For example, we stand on the Bible as "G-d's Word" as well we should. However, the Word is in human language, which is fraught with pitfalls. Additionally, when we read the Bible, we are interpreting the word through a fallable cognative facility.

We are woefully inadequate to understand G-d without G-d's help. And we should be charitable to all who misunderstand Him, because we probably do too. A little on our part would go a long way.

Shalom.

If you like, I will tell you what the purpose of life is...

Before you do, it might be helpful to talk about what you mean by "purpose". The usual meaning of "purpose" is, I suppose, something like "the aim of an intelligent agent".

Thus, an individual might do things for certain purposes. My purpose in poking at this keyboard is to communicate with you and others who may be following this thread.

I may be missing something, but it doesn't seem to make sense to talk about the purpose of life, meaning everyones life, unless one is talking about the aim of the creator of life.

kindly submit your formal deductive proofs of heavier than air flight, falsifiability, or painless surgery.

Science, falsifiability and technology proceed almost exclusively through inductive reasoning, which is inherently fallable, compared to formal deductive reasoning, which is, by the way, neither completely infallable, nor a complete cover for every possible true statement one might make in a discrete world.

If you wish to argue with this, I would think your first step would be to point me to the deductive proof of, say, some major scientific milestone, such as the theory of gravity.

The idea that everything must be proved before anything can be proved is simply stupid.

True, but irrelevant to the current discussion, which is about the absurd objectivist contention that you can only think about things effectively by employing formal deductive logic.

Proof is ubiquitous,

It is not, it is, in fact, very rare, except in formal mathematics. Most human reasoning is inductive, not deductive. Classically, induction is a tool for grasping things you might not yet grasp. Deductive reasoning is a tool for demonstrating that what you already know is self-consistent--which is rather rarely needed in reasoning about human affairs as the subject is generally too simple to require deductive vetting.

and the supposition that proof is not possible comes from careless observation (and a perverse desire to undercut human rationality).

This is 18th century objectivist brain-drizzle of the highest order, left over from the cartesian project's ambition to metrify the entire universe. As of the 20th century, there is a formal proof that all possible true statements cannot be proven in a discrete formal system. And in the general case, getting out a proof for a human problem is getting out a cannon to shoot a sparrow.

At any rate, that is not the issue in contention. Proof is usually possible, just usually an irrelevant and mind-bogglingly expensive waste of time. Induction, dispite it's overt fallibility, works well enough to get the day's work done, and has, intractibly accompanying this fallibility, greater reach and power than deduction, which is, in the end, just bean-counting about what we already know with a great deal of confidence from observation, participation, and inductive reasoning.

"Odd that we should think we can make progress this ragtag way, despite the conspicuous lack of proof of anything, eh? Or do you think physics has backslid greatly from the underdetermination of the law of gravity that has been flagrantly extant for the last 300 years?"

Physics of the Classical sort, that had embraced the possibility of final and objective cognition of natural phenomena, had prospered UNTIL objectivity was replaced by a flimsy epistemological relativism a la Kuhn, Popper, and Quine. The sorry state of current physics, guided by these notions, is testimony to the necessity of a return to employing science as a tool for attaining absolute understanding.

See David Harriman: "Where Have You Gone, Isaac Newton?"

http://www.geocities.com/rationalargumentator/Newton.html

I do concede that Newton did not account for certain microscopic phenomena that the instruments of his time could not have perceived. However, to state that his theory is somehow underdetermined in the MACROSCOPIC realm is absolutely improper; Newton's laws explain with absolute correctness the phenomena of macroscopic physics. Just like any concept of science, they have a finite domain over which they extend. Beyond that domain some of Einstein's and Planck's propositions account for what Newton could not. The problem with much of modern science is its attempt to view progress (in accordance with the Kuhn-Popper line of thought) as a series of shifting paradigms (rather than an edifice of latter layers building on the former) and apply Einsteinian physics or quantum mechanics to EVERYTHING, therefore resulting in a series of awkward relativistic propositions that can be instantaneously disproved by anyone with a set of open eyes and a functioning mind.

Mr. donh: "Well, in that case, you should be made aware of the fact that the "old-school" logic of Aristotle contained two syllogistic errors of set containment that were not detected until the 20th century."

Mr. Stolyarov: Would you care to tell me what those "errors" are?

Mr. donh: "Occum's Razor is not a rule of logic, it is a highly fallable guideline which, if followed exclusively, would quickly lead science into the crapper. Few of the painstaking, generations-spanning breakthroughs in science followed from Occum's Razor. From Mendeleev's peas to Woese's re-organization of the tree of life at it's root is as twisty and convoluted a story as one could imagine. Continents glued to the planet is an orders of magnetude simpler explanation for their existence than the theory of plate tektonics."

Mr. Stolyarov: Absolutely false. Occam's Razor states that one must accept the simplest interpretation allowed by the evidence. Often, given the nature and abundance of such evidence, even the simplest possible theory can, in itself, be quite complex. Take, for example, MENDEL's experiments with pea plants (Mendeleev was a chemist who authored the periodic table, of no relation to Mendel). Mendel's observations of the hereditary transmission of seven distinct traits in pea plants and his notice of the same general pattern led him to devise the laws of segregation and independent assortment and propose the forerunner of the concept of genes (heritable units). Mendel's evidence led him to postulate a simple but brilliant notion: that characteristics are transferred discretely and independently of one another. This is still true and not disputed today, though additions of evidence permitted a more complex theory still IN ACCORDANCE WITH Occam's Razor to be devised. When Thomas Morgan observed sex-linkage of traits and traits that were associated with one another in fruit flies, he proposed amplifications to Mendel's theory that the evidence accomodated. But he did NOT exceed the bounds ordained by Occam's Razor; he did not, for example, put forth a proposition that genes have a volition of their own and can link and un-link as they see fit (as this would have been preposterous and not supported by the evidence, though it would not directly contradict any of his observations).

Thus, interpreted properly, Occam's Razor is infallible and necessary to keep science from collapsing into a muck of relativistic post-modern quackery.

Mr. donh: " As objectivists have been wont to point out for half a century--the social (or philosophical) consequences of an idea about the natural world are no kind of evidence in favor of, or against it."

Mr. Stolyarov: The evidence against under-determination is as commonsense as the evidence of the validity of one's senses and the fact that 2+2=4. I am not arguing ad consequentiam, but rather stating why the notion is flawed from a variety of empirical or analytical perspectives and then presenting the logical consequences of embracing this idea (as, in Objectivist doctrine, theory and practice are inseparable). If underdetermination were indeed valid, how could you, as an advocate of underdetermination, be so sure that your own stance was not inconclusive and underdetermined by the "evidence" you currently perceive?

Physics of the Classical sort, that had embraced the possibility of final and objective cognition of natural phenomena, had prospered UNTIL objectivity was replaced by a flimsy epistemological relativism

I see. So physics has gone into a noticable decline in the last 100 years? Could I ask if you are using carrier pigeons to communicate with me?

I do concede that Newton did not account for certain microscopic phenomena that the instruments of his time could not have perceived. However, to state that his theory is somehow underdetermined in the MACROSCOPIC realm is absolutely improper

Then you are not paying much attention. Newton's theories implied a universe that was a fixed time-space frame, which produced problems he struggled with for years, unsuccessfully. In all of science, there was not a more radical remaking of the largest objects we see with our telescopes in the macro universe than that implied by Einstein's "miniscule" adjustments to Newton.

Would you care to tell me what those "errors" are?

Aristotle published a table of the valid forms of syllogism that a catagorical proposition could take. He got the universal forms all correct, but two of the particular forms were overreaches. As a testement to how much aristotalian logic was actually employed in human affairs, this was not discovered until a 20th century math student with way too much time on his hands bothered to check them all out with venn diagrams. If you want more details, I believe Rudy Rucker's "Mind Tools" goes into it in great detail.

Thus, interpreted properly, Occam's Razor is infallible and necessary to keep science from collapsing into a muck of relativistic post-modern quackery.

"Interpreted properly?" how about just submitting the deductive proof of the necessity for Occum's Razor? Oh, because there isn't any? How odd. What Occum's razor should shave, like causality, is oddly variant, depending on the predilictions of the observer. No proof has been offered, for example, that the canonical normal form of a logical statement to be implemented as curcuitry is optimal for all observers. When we use the canonical form of a logic curcuit equation to design a circuit, for example, it will get rejected by the design committee, because it produces too many logic glitches in the curcuit. Instead, we prefer to us some far more complex form of the equation, whose redundency will minimize race conditions. I invite you to submit the aristotalian proof as to which form of the equation satisfies Occum's Razor.

The evidence against under-determination is as commonsense as the evidence of the validity of one's senses and the fact that 2+2=4.

Another name for commonsense is "induction in everyday practice". Where is your deductive disproof of under-determination? As usual, objectivist pseudo-logical ravings without benefit of the object of their veneration, and their supposed touchstone--deductive proof. Kindly do not entertain me with any more of these intensely expressed, but substanceless non-proof arguments.

The problem with much of modern science is its attempt to view progress (in accordance with the Kuhn-Popper line of thought) as a series of shifting paradigms (rather than an edifice of latter layers building on the former)

Even Kuhn, who is the worst offender, does not contend that science is, at base, not undergirded by a search for, and belief in, objective reality. Like many objectivists, you seem unable to differentiate between thoroughgoing subjectivists, like Berkeley, and the people at the technical forefront of recognizing (and thereby trying to minimize the problems of) the limits and outright failures (for which specific, tangible, objective examples are available for viewing, and which I have laid before you to no avail) of both our formal and informal tools of reasoning.

Your position is not reasonable, and it is not objective. Mislabeling and intense advertising to the contrary notwithstanding.

If underdetermination were indeed valid, how could you, as an advocate of underdetermination, be so sure that your own stance was not inconclusive and underdetermined by the "evidence" you currently perceive?

I am not sure, but that does not prevent me from proceeding, because relatively confident is good enough. Just as I am not sure I will get to grandma's for xmas dinner without a fatal car crash, but the odds being in my favor pursuades me to go anyway. Why are objectivists so universally unable to perceive how tepid this form of argument is?

I may be missing something, but it doesn't seem to make sense to talk about the purpose of life, meaning everyones life, unless one is talking about the aim of the creator of life.

The purpose of life pertains to all life, from the simplest organism to the most complex. Now you have introduced a word for which the meaning is not specified, so, before we go any futher, you are going to have to tell me what a, "creator of life" is, unless you mean one's parents, in which case they have nothing to do with determining the purpose of one's life.

By the way, the purpose of life only pertains to individual's lives. There is no collective purpose of life, no purpose of "everyone's" life.

Hank

The purpose of life pertains to all life, from the simplest organism to the most complex. Now you have introduced a word for which the meaning is not specified, so, before we go any further, you are going to have to tell me what a, "creator of life" is, unless you mean one's parents, in which case they have nothing to do with determining the purpose of one's life.

The usual meaning of "purpose" is, I suppose, something like "the aim of an intelligent agent".

Thus, an individual might do things for certain purposes. My purpose in poking at this keyboard is to communicate with you and others who may be following this thread.

I may be missing something, but it doesn't seem to make sense to talk about the purpose of all life, including the life of a simple organism, unless one is talking about the aim the creator, God, had in creating life.

I understand that you do not believe in God. Thus, I can't make any sense of your reference to "purpose" with respect to the life of a simple organism. What do you mean by the word?