[om-list] Re: Pragmatism

[Mark Butler]

Tom,

  Pragmatism and the simple faith have a lot in common.  Much of philosophy is
dead in the water because philosophers cannot prove the simplest things that
every rational person believes.  Instead, they have become permanently stuck
in an epistemological swamp.

Karl Popper is a good example.  I think that some of his ideas, at least as
understood by the outside world, appear to have done a lot of good in helping
people understand the basic requirements for a meaningful scientific theory. 
However, to my great disappointment, it turns out his core philosophy is
irrational and absolutely un-scientific.  I quote David Stove on Karl Popper:

[BEGIN QUOTE]
What was novel about Popper's famous doctrine of "falsifiability" was not the
idea that negative instances disconfirm or "falsify" a theory.  The fact that
the proposition "All ravens are black" is disconfirmed by the appearance of
one white raven is a logical truism.  What was novel was the amazing thought
that positive instances do not - in principle *cannot* - act to confirm a
proposition or a theory.  For Popper, if every raven anyone has ever seen is
black, that fact gives no rational support for the belief that all ravens, in
fact, are black.  Scientific laws, he says, "can never be supported, or
corroborated, or confirmed by scientific evidence."  He goes even further: of
two hypotheses "the one which can be *better corroborated*, is always *less
probable*."  Whatever else these statements may be, they are breathtakingly
irrationalist.
[END QUOTE]

Needless to say, I have very little respect remaining for the ideas of Karl
Popper.  I can understand where he is coming from logically, but his
philosophical position is the exact opposite of scientific empiricism.

Logical deduction is trivial.  There is no statement producable by logical
deduction that contains any more information than the combination of its
premises contains.  Usually, it contains less information, i.e. constrains
reality far less than its combined premises do.  e.g.

All men are mortal & Socrates is a man =>  Socrates is mortal.

Basically, deduction is a method for throwing away information irrelevant to
the situation at hand, in this case that men other than Socrates are mortal as
well.

Scientific induction, on the other hand, is on much shakier ground than
deduction.  It rests completely on the idea of statistical determinism, that
is that statistical relationships measured under controlled circumstances in
the past will be repeated within a reasonable margin of error in the future. 

Popper and company are coming from the point of view that since statistical
determinism is logically unprovable, there is no way a scientific theory can
be  "supported, corroborated, or confirmed by scientific evidence."

So what basis does one then have to believe in the process of scientific
induction and all conclusions reached thereby?  There is only one, namely
faith. In particular, faith that laws of nature actually exist and do not
change from day to day.  Faith that the those laws prescribe results that are
at least statistically determinate (like those in quantum mechanics), for
another.  And finally, faith that those laws are simple and elegant enough to
allow close approximations to be discovered by mere mortals through
statistical analysis.

Absent that faith, induction has nowhere to lead to and deduction has nowhere
to start from.

- Mark

-- 
Mark Butler	       ( butlerm at middle.net )
Software Engineer  
Epic Systems              
(801)-451-4583


Tom and other Packers wrote:
> 
> Mark
> 
>     I'm just now getting back into researching this subject, too, as I try
> to formulate a theoretical foundation on which to present my senior project
> (a set of machine-learning algorithms which I will compare).  Two things I
> have just found:
> 
>     (1) "Pragmatism".  Did you know that pragmatism is thought among the
> philosophical community to be the only substantial American contribution to
> philosophy?  Perhaps the biggest proponent of it was William James, which
> was where I was reading about it, in his book by the same name.  (I forget
> the name of the guy who coined the term, but he was American, too, and an
> associate of William James.)  Pragmatism seems to be nearly the same idea
> that your quote on the Hebrew perception of truth says.  It's all about
> tying theoretical truth to concrete reality, which has a "practical"
> consequence, ("practicality" is just part of the full meaning of
> "pragmatism").
> 
>     I heard about this idea before, in "Four Philosophies: and their
> Practice in Education and Religion", by J. Donald Butler, a book my grandpa
> gave me just before he died.  ("Practice" is an etymological cousin to
> "pragmatism".)  Do you know if you're related to this Butler?
> 
>     (2) I almost thought I finally found a
> philosopher/logician/mathematician who realised that deduction and induction
> are inverses of each other, and therefore mutually interdependent.  His name
> was W. S. Jevons.  Actually, it turns out that what he said was that
> deduction is basic and that induction is the inverse of deduction, (not
> necessarily vice versa).  Whether or not he ever realised that each are
> interdependent, and that all logical inference is one, big, circular
> argument, without a foundation, I have yet to discover.  But, you can be
> sure, I will continue looking.
> 
>     It seems silly to me that any of these famous philosophers would not
> have found what I call "the symmetry heuristic", and used it to discover all
> of these complimentary aspects of knowledge modelling and inference
> methodology.
> 
>     Another interesting thing he said (in the form of the title of one of
> his books) was that logic is "the science of quality, apart from quantity",
> which is exactly how I've been using those words.  Mathematics would
> therefore be the science of quantity, apart from quality; but again, I'm not
> sure he saw that complementary side of the issue.
> 
>     I about to read a book by Karl Popper.  He has much to say about
> induction, and the philosophy of science, and therefore about pragmatics;
> and so far I think he is on our side, recognising the necessity of concrete
> reality in formulating any ideas about truth and reality.
> 
> ciao,
> tomp
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark Butler" <butlerm at middle.net>
> To: "Thomas L. Packer" <TomP at burgoyne.com>
> Sent: Sunday, February 25, 2001 1:07 PM
> Subject: Hebrew perception of Truth
> 
> Hi Tom,
> 
> I found this quote of Thorlief Bowman about the Hebrew perception of truth
> in
> an article called '"What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?": Apostasy and
> Restoration in the Big Picture' on the F.A.R.M.S web site
> (http://farms.byu.edu/free/index.html) to be quite interesting:
> 
> "The . . . Hebrew concept of truth is expressed by means of derivatives of
> the
> verb aman-"to be steady, faithful"; amen-"verily, surely";
> omen-"faithfulness"; umnam-"really"; emeth-"constancy, trustworthiness,
> certainty, fidelity to reported facts, truth"; cf. omenah-"pillar,
> door-post".
> In short, the Hebrews really do not ask what is true in the objective sense
> but what is subjectively certain, what is faithful in the existential sense;
> therefore, it is not what is in agreement with impersonal objective being
> that
> interests them, but what is in agreement with the facts that are meaningful
> for them. This shows that Hebrew thought is directed toward events, living,
> and history in which the question of truth is of another sort than in
> natural
> science. In such matters the true is the completely certain, sure, steady,
> faithful."
> 
> I think the whole article is interesting, but I thought this quote lends
> some
> support to using induction as a method for approximating the truth.  Perhaps
> this comes up because I have recently read a blistering criticism of recent
> scientific philosophers like the well known Thomas Kuhn who apparently
> actually believe that induction (i.e. the scientific method) is completely
> worthless as a means for determining the truth.   The criticism was by the
> recently deceased Australian philosopher David Stove in a book called
> "Against
> the Idols of the Age".   I think you would like it, if you want to borrow
> it.
> 
> - Mark