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

On Sun, Dec 23, 2012 at 11:13 AM, David Deutsch <david.deutsch-LR/[email protected]> wrote:

> currently called 'justificationism', namely that knowledge is that which can be justified as true, or likely to be true, etc.


That is not what justificationism means. Justificationism is the
concept that ideas have an amount/degree/weight of justification
(epistemic status, aka confirmation, support, authority, probability,
etc), by which we should judge them. Ideas with more
justification/weight/evidence/etc are deemed better than ideas with
less.

In this view, there are positive and negative arguments. Arguments for
an idea, and against it. The positive arguments add points and the
negative arguments subtract points. (The points are often
metaphorical, non-numeric and inexact.) If an idea has many positive
arguments, e.g. "a lot of evidence", then there could be several
negative arguments and it could have a high score anyway.

One way this view is different from critical thinking is that it often
allows ignoring, rather than addressing, criticism.

Another problem is the weights given to everything are arbitrary.

-- 
Elliot Temple
http://curi.us/