Posted by
glen ropella on
Apr 09, 2013; 9:09pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Fwd-New-post-The-Loud-and-Clear-Message-that-the-TED-Controversy-is-Sending-tp7582434p7582627.html
Steve's mention of Peirce and abduction reminded me that I intended to
respond to this.
I'm intrigued by your use of "quasi-tautological". I'm not a big fan of
consensus, obviously. So, I could criticize that, even pragmatically,
if you'd like. But I care more about the (truly) tautological nature of
justificationism and why you identify a convergence onto what we "do"
doubt and what we have confidence in as quasi-tautological.
To be clear, I usually claim that all deduction is tautology, a
constructive, reversible walk from premise to conclusion. (This
disallows proof by contradiction, which requires getting at least one's
toes wet with meta concepts like paradox, consistency, completeness,
abduction, etc.) A convergence like the consensus you lay out, however,
requires an inductive extrapolation from what the many of us do/think to
what is trustworthy (if not true).
Why is this quasi-tautological rather than (truly) tautological? Is it
because you give some credit to the complicatedness of deduction (i.e.
that we can walk from premises to conclusion doesn't automatically imply
that the conclusions are the same as the premises)? Or is it because
induction somehow injects something more into the result, over and above
whatever info was embedded/implied in the premises? Or is there some
other reason?
Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/05/2013 12:10 PM:
> Well, you may all soon tire of my attempt to channel the classical
> pragmatist, C.S Peirce, but it is an interesting perspective, one that has
> had broad influence on our thought, but whose foundations have gotten
> trampled into the intellectual midden in the last 100 years, and therefore,
> I think, worth digging up and dusting off.
>
> I think the classical pragmatic answer to Glen's comment would be, whatever
> produces consensus in the very long run is science. So, as glen would point
> out, this does not, by itself, produce demarcations between good thought ...
> experimental thought, in the broadest sense ... and the other kinds. But
> Peirce was much taken by the period in the late 18th and early 19th
> centuries in which a tremendous amount of opinion was settled ... a
> consensus was reached ... on the nature of the elements, a consensus that
> mainly endures until today. So I think he would advise us to turn to the
> methods of that period and say, use these as a guide to conduct our search
> for the truth in the future. He would agree that such advice is provisional
> ... fallible is the term he would use ... but he is contemptible of anything
> that smacked of Cartesian skeptism. Nobody, he would say, is skeptical as a
> matter of fact. Doubt is not something we entertain (except as sophists);
> it is something that is forced upon us and it is a painful state that we try
> to resolve in favor of belief. So, it is important to talk not about what
> we "can" doubt, but what we "do" doubt. And when we do that, when we look
> at which methods we have confidence in and which we actually doubt, we will
> see that we have ways of arriving at consensus ... in the long run ... about
> which methods to use. And yes that is quasi-tautological.
>
> Nick
> The Village Pragmatist
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam [mailto:
[hidden email]] On Behalf Of glen
> Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 9:12 AM
> To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Fwd: [New post] The Loud and Clear Message that the TED
> Controversy is Sending
>
> Nicholas Thompson wrote at 04/04/2013 10:03 PM:
>> Again, acting in my capacity as the Village Pragmatist, I would assert
>> that science is the only procedure capable of producing lasting
>> consensus. The other methods .... various forms of torture, mostly
>> ... do not produce such enduring results. N
>
> While I agree with you in the abstract, it still doesn't address the meaning
> of "scientific evidence". My assertion is that the variance exhibited by
> the many meanings of evidence within science is wide enough to cast doubt on
> the stability (or perhaps even coherence) of the term in science.
>
> And if that's the case, then claims for the superiority of scientific
> evidence over other meanings of evidence are suspicious claims ...
> deserving of at least as much skepticism as anecdotal evidence or even
> personal epiphany.
>
> Rather than assume an oversimplified projection onto a one dimensional
> partial order, perhaps there are as many different types of evidence as
> there are foci of attention, a multi-dimensional space, with an orthogonal
> partial ordering in each dimension.
--
=><= glen e. p. ropella
But now I'm living on the profits of pride
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