Re: Solidity is degree of justification (was: Mirror neurons at autopsy)

--- In [email protected], Elliot Temple <curi@...> wrote:
>
> 
> On Dec 18, 2012, at 2:53 PM, David Deutsch <david.deutsch@...> wrote:
> 
> > (Well, I say we know this -- but that explanation is not nearly as solid as the ones above.
> 
> This is justificationism.
> 
> -- Elliot Temple
> http://fallibleideas.com/
>


I may be wrong, but I thought I'd noticed a shift in DD's vocabularly of late. For example in his Edge talk on Constructor Theory. I was quite intrigued why that would be. It isn't due to major 
philosophical shifs because he has continued to reiterate and reinforce much of that over the same period. 

At first I thought the most obvious explanation was something along the lines of "talk their lingo", as in "when in Rome..." etc. 
 
But...my intuition tells me that doesn't fit with the way things happened. If that was the reason there would probably be less of it, and it would probably involve restatement, where the same point was made using the more familiar popper/deutsch vocabularly. Also other things...as I say intuitive. 

So the other possibility, which I'm still working through, was that the shift in vocabularly was related to the shift in his life back toward actively aspiring, and trying, to produce hard theoretical science. Maybe there are needs that show up when you do that, that the scientific lingo - talk of solidities and justifications and relative strengths and whatever else - are just good short hand for what needs to get done. 

Certainly, the contexts in which he used those words (as I remember)seemed always to exclude the possibility of any underpinning of [bad] philosophy

Just thinking...