Thinking in terms of chains of causalities

My whole criticism of Popper could be perfectly captured by saying he
accepted what the philosophical middlemen were saying verbatim at face
value and proceeded to criticize it. Seeing it that way it isn't hard to
see why you are having such trouble with this criticism, because surely
I am simply describing the correct and proper way to do it. C&R
describes a conjecture from one party, and its criticism by another.

Sure. But you have to think in terms of the whole chain of causality
arising out of this decision. The problem is not the way popper
criticizes the position at face value, but what he then goes on to do
with that criticism. He defines the foundation 'issue' as exactly what
the philosophical middleman says it to be, and he then proceeds to
refute it on those terms. He then uses that to define a principle of
foundationalism, which goes on to be high influential in the processes
of eflimination that see the popperian principles fixed into place.

You just can't do things this way so simply. The intention to use
refuted conjecture for the construction of a fundamental component of
the philosophy or whatever you are constructing, immediately implies the
necessity to control or severe dependencies by abstractly constructing a
robust interface of separation. Otherwise, what happens is you introduce
an implicit or otherwise causal chain of reasoning that can and will
depend the structure of your philosophy on the structure of the original
conjecture.

This is robustness 101 concepts I would say.

You only have to think about it for a moment. The other guy has intuited
some importance for some vague concept involving something like
'foundations'. He makes a go of things and guesses for one way such a
concept could assemble in reality. In so doing he totally defines the
key properties of that concept that describe its scope and boundary. All
the properties defining this concept are those defined by him. All the
properties that may or may not be signficant as well are permanently
excluded from the concept. All the ways of looking at the concept, or
parallel 'faces' and 'representations' are fixed to what he says. All
the contexts and manifestations are fixed to what he says.

Popper performs legitimate C&R. But in the first approximation that is a
process of, as you'll agree, accepting everything verbatim. Of course it
is possible and probably expected that criticism will eventually act to
evolve the concept somewhat. But for that to happen it has to actually
happen, and in the instance of these philosophical propositions it does
not happen. Foundationalism still stands entirely as the reverse of the
original proposition. The *explanation* for why foundationalism (say)
has seen expansion into richer forms, but that's a completely different
matter. What thoset  explanations do is enrichen for why Foundationalism
*as originally defined* is a mistake.

As an aside those enrichening explanations are another instance of
chains of causalities in the philosophy. This bears mentioning because
if one considers what these 'chains of causality' actually *are*, or the
kind that is important here.  They are consequenes...knock on
consequences. What they consequences of can be regarded as held
constant. Now, you might say, hey that can't be right. Look at emergence
and the reality of abstractions. Those are independent lines of
reasoning, so they aren't chains of consequences of the concept of
foundationalism at all.

That would be true, but it is also a view of things set in a wrong
context. When the context is that of two independent threads of
reasoning having knock-on consequences for oneanother (say enrichening
the detail), then the basic logic of the situation pushes the concept of
'causal chains' I am using here up a level of abstraction. Why?
Well...it's pretty much a feature of whatever level things are defined,
that the material you are using involves components that break down to
lowever detail levels. So by the inherent arrangement of things, a chain
of consequences attached to whatever object sits a level up from all the
underlying insecting threads of reasoning making up that object.

But the point is these chains of - call them what you want -
causalities, consequences, implicit influences: however you think of
them they are real (though individual conjectures for a specific chain
is obviously may be mistaken).

They are realities. And in the case of Poppers analysis of the
propositions of those philosophical middleman, the influences are
particularly evident for a curious absense of subsequent criticism in
the process...admittedly unusual for C&R.

Unusual, but in fact explicable and expected in this instance. There is
a reason criticism does not materialize questioning the robustness of
the dependencies created between the way the propostions were originally
defined, and the preservation of that original scoping in the final form
of the principle that becomes fixed into the philosophy (as an error).
That reason is another side of the same coin for why you are having so
much trouble seeing the reality of this problem.

Criticisms don't happen because any process required in doing that, is
simply left far behind..by the massive acceleration of the process of
elimination that sees popper's philosophy fixed in, as a direct
consequence this exact same mistake that Popper made. The refuted
principles make up the most significant component of the 'possible'
explanations for how things can be (how knowledge is created etc). Which
makes the process of elimination more of a formality, which culminates
in the acceleration of poppers ideas to a fixed status. As explanations
they never go through a process of rigourous scrutiny as to whether they
actually do deliver, because in fact as the only explanation standing to
do this would be anti-popperian.

So again, you'd have to think in terms of the philosophy as interweaving
threads and 'chains' of influences like consequences, in order to see
how it happens that Popper introduces all these distorting influences by
following this process of converting refuted conjected directly into
powerfully influential principles, and yet this never attracts criticism
despite its starkly striking apparence. The reason is that in the
meantime, the definition of, say, foundationalism as it stands is well
into a process of being 'locked in' in precisely that form. You see it
has already been involved in the definition of other principles, and all
together those principles have already been used in the process of
fixing in poppers philosophy. Foundationalism (say) has to be exactly as
it is defined, and the solutions that have been put in place have to be
precisely as they are, because they represent the only solution left
standing.

And as psychologically normal human beings, Popperians are right in the
middle of that locking in process, either creating it or learning about
it. The view from where popperians are standing is that of a rich
evolution of robust principles forged in a critical process unparalled
in any other human phenomenon. The reason why, say, foundationalism and
its solution are complete and incontrovertible can be found
multifariously distributed across multiple other principles and laws.
The view from within says scrutinizing the fundamentals of these
principles would be an utterly unpromising and fruitless thing to do.
And so, it doesn't happen.

But the problems I am raising are real and because they are, and because
the philosophy is such a rich structure, the reality of this problem can
be revealed in ever more detail as part of an unending process.

The way Popper u. sed the scoping of the original propositions to
formulate principles, problems and then solutions to those problems as
part of the same unbroken process - an unbroken causality of reasoning,
is literally a complicated form of something equivalent to the logical
fallacy of 'begging the question'. By failing to see that he would need
to eliminate all dependencies - and this would have to happen 'by
design' as an objective solution, Popper instantiated a direct
relationship between all the assumptions that went into the original
scoping of the proposition, and the scoping of all the principles,
problems and their solutions that followed. All of it in the same
unbroken chain.

Something like begging the question happens between the proposition and
the product. I really do think this is sort of a "101" issue. If you
accept the terms by which someone else defines an issue and then use
those same terms to define other things, capture problems, propose
solutions, then it should be clear that you've uncritically agreed to
see things entirely on that person's terms.