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

On Thu, Dec 27, 2012 at 4:04 AM, David Deutsch <david.deutsch-LR/[email protected]> wrote:
> On 25 Dec 2012, at 23:58, Elliot Temple <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> for truth

For epistemology.



>> Ideas with more
>> justification/weight/evidence/etc are deemed better than ideas with less.
>
> Deemed to be truer, more likely to be true, more likely to contain more truth, etc. That is the mistake.
>
> But that does not mean that ideas cannot have any non-binary attributes. For example they can be longer or shorter to express, depend more or less on mathematics, be more or less relevant to a given problem, be more or less original, more or less useful -- and (as I have said) easier or harder to vary as explanations (relative to a given state of background knowledge).
>


All those other non-epistemological attributes matter when there is an
explanation of why they matter. This resolves the issue of *how* they
matter: they matter in the way that explanation says (not by the
generic method of increasing or decreasing any sort of epistemic
status). Sometimes uncontroversial background knowledge covers such
explaining for us, but sometimes it does not.


> easier or harder to vary as explanations (relative to a given state of background knowledge)

This is ambiguous. Varying things is easy without constraints, e.g.
anything can be varied to the word "cow". The constraints intended are
unstated. Varied under what constraints?

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