Re: Intuitive

--- In [email protected], Brett Hall <brhalluk@...> wrote:
>
> On 04/05/2013, at 21:04, "hibbsa" <hibbsa@...> wrote:


> > > What would analysing science "directly" entail
> >
> > Minimally it would entail a decision to cut out 
>>the philosopher middle
> > men and go see for himself.

> Whom does "himself" refer to? The scientist? You 
> want the scientist to "go see for himself" how 
> science is done or something? 

Brett - I can see that I haven't made it clear yet what the correct approach would be to analyse Science. I can certainly reassure you though it is nothing to do with calls for empiricism or observing scientists at work. Although certainly it could and would naturally lead to that eventually, just as it does in science. I don't think there's a difference between real philosophy and real science. Neither does Deutsch so we agree. 

But at the moment most of my effort is going into trying to shed light on what went wrong in the Popperian philosophy. I am not yet putting effort into explaining what I think the right approach entails. I think it is important to see how and why something went wrong in the Popperian philosophy becaue that is linked to how and why the way I used is correct. I think it's going to be hard to understand what went wront with Popper, and in some cases hard to want to understand. I of course fully accept this could go the other way. 

So perhaps concentrate on the area I am putting effort in...what went wrong with Popper. If you want to. 

And if I want to respond to future posts to me from you on this matter. We both have to want to. On my side I will need to see some sign of real thought. FYI the question you ask above and several below don't really 'do it' for me.  

>  
> You haven't answered the question. Not in the slightest. What would analysing science "directly" entail???

I think I did give a reasonable answer, so long as you realize there is no intrinsic 'right way' to do things. It needs explaining. Each way raises its own problems and as Deutsch say, interesting problems are soluable. Popper could have made it work the way he did it, if he'd seen the problems and solved them. But he didn't and that's the real issue here. 

I think the reason he didn't is because the way everything was set up made it devilishly hard to 'see' the problem. As indeed people are finding hard here. The 'direct' solution, is not direct in the empirical sense...and 'direct' probably isn't a good word. Let me try another simple expr? ession for the distinction between Popper Deutsch approach and mine. 

If Popper Deutsch's approach could be summed up as the answer to this question: What if Science was Easy To Happen? 

Then my approach could be summed up as: What if Science was Really Hard To Happen. 

I think this is a good way to understand things, and actually that question is pretty much what has guided me. If Popper Deutsch had asked that question at the start, I think they would have basically ended up with something along the lines of what they did get. A lucky coincidence of conditions allows a simple but profound thing called a Culture of Criticism to take root (one condition being 'Rejection of Authority'). 

This allows Science to be hard to happen but only in the sense the coincidence of the conditions needed to be 'lucky'

With Science Easy to Happen, then almost by definition the specific details of the specific way it happend aren't necessarily important. And in fact, as they 'discover' in the event was mostly all nonsense. So there you go. 

But if the root question is "What if Science was Really Hard to Happen" then the starting point becomes "What if the way Science happened...all it's key traits as they really were....were literally the only way Science could have happened, because the Problems that had to be solved were Really Really Hard." 

...and so on and so on... So you see it's not about 'observatio' or 'empiricism' or anything like that. And yet it is about 'directness' in some sort of way.  
  
> > > Also, Popper's philosophy is not solely a description, it also
> > > prescribes standards for scientists to live up to. Can you improve on
> > > those standards?
> 
> These are important questions, hibbsa! You should attempt an answer.
> 

Well Brett, they are important questions but showing that Popper went wrong early on, is actually a pretty big category level answer to those questions. 

> Incidentally, do you think Popper, and Deutsch explain epistemology as best as it is currently understood? Or do you think there is some better way of understanding the growth of knowledge?

Yes I think they are wrong, but that they also get a lot right. For example I think it is possible to be completey right that, say, Foundationalism is a catastrophic error, and yet have a completely partial and inadequate explanation of the real issue about Foundations. In the same way, I think it's possible to get a lot right about Knowledge and yet for initially pretty subtle omissions be profoundly off base at the same time. 

About knowledge...I think the right idea...and the right way to express it...would be much more in the vein of scientific conceptualization and expression. And no surprise there, because I happen to think that way of doing things 'evolved' for a reason and that reason involved a major Problem that is and was incredibly hard to solve. 

So the upshot is that, first off, the concept of true creation has to be completely dismissed absent an explanation. And that includes as part of the C&R process. 

So the best way to understand this in general, is that new knowledge 'creation' comes about as the integration of two (or more) pre-existent knowledge sets, whether implicit or otherwise. 

Try to think of an exception to that.

For example Criticism itself is intrinsically a goal-oriented procedure. That goal could be good philosophy, but on some given instance it could also be something more mundane like "this guy is stupid I'm not going to bother reading his ideas but he gets on my nerves so I'm going to shut him down'. I mean, we might not think it explicitly, but we all moments like that don't we? Or something similar. 

So that criticism...that we actually make...is a slightly different concept..it's a marriage of those explicit and implicit goals, and lots of other stuff to do with the conditions there and then..and whatever the other party has brought to the table. 

The truth is this model, I don't think contradicts C&R at all. It allows for it. But what it also does is imply different lines of consequences, which create different problems, the solutions of which lead to different things. 

But it's inherently something that can be expressed mimimally, probably in a logic or math form with effort. It's also something that implies hard, objective-by-design consequences..things that can be said - always - about every act of knowledge growth. Things that have ramifications. 

For example, if every piece of knowlege growth (and much else, like I say, criticism) is an integration of two or more knowledge sets, then the first big ramification is that knowledge is never a clean explanation of one thing. The explanation is changed by the other knowledge set. It becomes a mixture result. 

What that means is, for example, if you allow a large implicit assumption to enter your knowledge creations process, and if it becomes 'the other' knowledge set as you integrate two to create new knowledge, then you will have embedded that assumption deeply into the very fibre of your explanatory world. And that new knowledge becomes important in the creation of yet more, then that original implicit assumption will become yet more embedded. In some cases it will be diluted out, but in others it will keep on growing.  

The implication, in the end, is that unpicking large influential assumptions gets more and more difficult as new knowledge builds up, and this is a pretty exponential effect in product knowledge creation systems. 

This usually doesn't happen, for example a badly motivated criticism can only impact the whole of knowledge so far as that particular criticism has real enduring influence into that world of knowledge. Mostly, the influence doesn't appear so it works out ok. 

Now...there are I believe knock on implications about this, that pose serious questions for the basic idea of C&R. 

There are many other consequences of viewing knowledge this way. The consequences are more powerful and more objective by design, because this model intrinsically kicks out unknowns like 'creativity'. And does so, without actually asserting anything about the world at all. As I say, the model doesn't have to explain real knowledge growth to be 'real'...it only has to be consistent with real knowledge growth. The *consequences* and *results* of working through the problems will decide the question of truth....as they work ever nearer to it, or not. 

There's another objective-by-design implication by the way..if it is true. If all knowledge is created as the integration of two (or more) knowledge sets, then every time we create knowledge we are implicitly asking this question: "What would it take for these two knowledge sets to be consistent and part of the same thing"? 

That's an important understanding, I think. Because, if we are always asking that question, then for the same reason as Popper Deutsch realize regarding the importance of 'making explicit' it becomes important to always make that question explicit as part of a suite of other solutions geared toward controlling what those two knowledge sets actually are. 

So it would follow from that, that the most productive scientific threads are linked to how explicitly that question was. 

Newton's was "What would it take for [how he saw gravity and motion behave on Earth] and [What he saw in the sky] to be consisten and part of the same thing". 

Try using that question, and just some realism (another very important but dangerous knowledge set) and Kepler's Laws...another knowledge Newtwon had, and see how far you can go to invent all the laws that Newton did. You, or some others here, will be surprised...it's like butter off a knife. 

So....as you see....from a different question come different answers...and the measure of which is the right route, is in the results.