Tal's epistemology (and DCP's)

[_Tarski]

So is this thread dead....do I need to unsticky it?

Or were people promising a few more responses.....

Unsticky it for now.

[_marg]

To mo-watcher, I responded to you in another thread, subject heading "To Mo-watcher cont'd"

To Bond: I'm disappointed in the quick removal from "sticky" status of the thread. I think this is the sort of subject that can take time to think about and discuss. A thread on the "theory of knowledge" makes for a good permanent sticky thread, in my opinion.

[_Yoda]

If Tarski wants this re-stickied, I'll be more than happy to do that. Since he's the originator of the thread, it's his call.

[_Tal Bachman]

Hi, I'm back.

To mo-watcher:

Perhaps, from what follows, you will be able to understand my approach on the "FAIR" board.

First of all, it is not true that I ignored every response to anything I posted on the FAIR board, and if you were as impartial and attentive an observer as you make yourself out to be, you would know that perfectly well. I responded, often at length, to a variety of posters, even during my last (short) stint over there a few months ago. (That stint, by the way, ended when I stopped posting after the moderators announced that I had "broken the board rules" by doing something which, that I could see, I had not done at all. In a story which will be familiar to many here, I was surprised by this accusation and emailed the moderators repeatedly, asking them to show me an example from my posts where I had done what they accused me of. My private inquiries, however, were ignored, until one guy finally emailed me back announcing that the charges against me had already been made clear on the board and that I could read over them again if I wanted - no explanation, or "evidence", would be forthcoming [of course not, since there was no "evidence"]. My, uh, "punishment", by these wonderful souls, so eager to demonstrate their devotion to the ninth commandment, so eager to show the world that Mormonism has nothing to do with the smiling, spiritual Stalinism alleged by its bitterest critics, was a significant restriction of board privileges. And that, while the same moderators repeatedly demonstrated their wilingness to allow certain other posters - who of course, were on "the correct side" - to violate board rules and norms just as flagrantly and often as they wished. Nice!

By the way, I offered to apologize for whatever rule I might have broken inadvertently, but again, I couldn't see how I'd broken any, and they couldn't or wouldn't show me, and but for one reply, wouldn't respond to my inquiries. So, I stopped posting there. Perhaps "MAD" really is the best acronym for such a place...

Oh yes - the exception. There was one exception, some years ago, where I tried to post installments of a critique of Davis Bitton's essay, "I Don't Have A Testimony Of Church History" (which may just be the most transparently dumb LDS apologetic essay ever), without responding along the way to the all-too-predictable derailment/distraction attempts of the church's salaried and amateur shills. That is, I repeatedly mentioned that I wanted to discuss and defend my critique AFTER it had been posted in its entirety. Can you understand that, "mo-watcher"?

Have you, for example, ever tried to make a case for something, while you are repeatedly being interrupted by people? And by people who give every impression of just wanting you to shut up and go away (that is, their interruptions aren't meant to clarify, but to silence)? That is a classic tactic of ideological zealots - what they cannot establish by facts or logic, they try to render victorious-by-default through destroying the ability of others to present opposing arguments - in the most benign cases, through interruption, distracting personal insults, changing the subject, heckling, etc. So YES, I "ignored" the heckling attempts, which were fairly numerous, as I was posting my critique, but as I told everyone then, I would have been happy to respond at length once I had posted the whole thing. It's just that - could it be any more obvious? - if I had stopped to respond to every absurd heckling attempt, I would have never have been able to make my points.

As it happened, as I was posting my installments, one of the mods emailed me and said that I was required to respond to the distraction attempts, or I would be banned from posting; there was no allowance for the presentation of a case first, and THEN its defense. Noooo...not on the "fair" board: no sooner do you demonstrate some glaring contradiction in some silly apologetic piece, than some pro or amateur heckler comes along to try to derail you, and now you're required to stop what you're saying and get sucked into some endless vortex of irrelevancies, the only (and again, obvious) point of which is to destroy your ability to communicate your original points. Either way, "Mormonism wins again - We really ARE in the one true religion! - Hurrah!". Get it? If you stop what you're saying to respond to each disingenuous heckler, you don't make your points, and Mormon belief is therefore once again protected; but if you DO try to make your points, then they ban you - and Mormon belief is therefore once again protected. (One must be forgiven for wondering why, if Mormon belief is really based on the witness of the "most powerful testator of truth in the universe" - rather than on the workings of the human psyche - it should require such [censorious] protection...).

By the way, here is a link to Bitton's article. I suppose you can judge for yourself just how much sense it makes, and how effective it is at defending the proposition that Mormonism is what it claims to be: http://www.fairlds.org/FAIR_Conferences ... hurch.html

[_Tal Bachman]

Tarski asked earlier what account of inductive reasoning I can give which avoids Hume's argument that it cannot be justified on logical grounds.

I don't really know, but here is one idea off the top of my head (and which I have no particular allegiance to). It is based on a now almost universally dismissed argument first made, to my knowledge, by P.F. Strawson (which also, I can remember only vaguely...):

If I remember right, Strawson calls into question whether inductive reasoning should even be presumed to require a logical justification. Perhaps, that is, the entire “problem” is itself the result of a misunderstanding, and in reality, a non-problem. He says something to the effect of of induction being so crucial, or inseparable from, mental activity itself, that asking if it is "logical" is "like asking whether the law is legal". Here is how my top-of-my-head argument here goes:

Wherever we look in nature, we see living organisms, human, animal, and even plants, behave just as we would expect them to behave if they were making inductive inferences; that is, as if their behaviour were a reaction to an estimation about the unobserved (including the future) based on the observed.

I am embarrassed to regard as possibly genetically related the defensive action of a threatened plant and, say, the defensive action of a threatened group of human beings; and yet, when I am honest with myself, I cannot (at the moment, anyway) explain to myself how the observed behaviours betray any genetic difference in themselves. Were a besieged “superorganism” of one hundred soldiers, stuck inside a castle, to seek to attract by some means the enemies of those surrounding them, so that their besiegers would be destroyed, we would say that the superorganism undertook this action because it considered that action more likely to save them, than doing nothing, or undertaking some other action. In other words, we would regard the besieged soldiers as having made a series of inductive inferences – e.g., about how much longer they could survive the siege, about the mindset and performance of both their besiegers and those who might wish to destroy them, the value placed on their attractant by their potential liberators, etc. - which culminated in a final calculation of the likelihood of success of an action, and then the commission of the action itself.

But – the example I gave in an earlier post, provided by Kim Sterelny (who Tarski approvingly referenced on just this matter of inductive inference), of corn plants releasing a chemical odour to attract the enemies of insects devouring them, seems to me very analogous behaviourally. And the truth is, many hundreds of similar examples could be produced, from every form of plant, animal, and human life. And as Tarski also implied, in the end it is difficult to see how entirely involuntary and unconscious homeostatic processes differ in principle from what we are talking about.

Accordingly, Tarski and someone else raised the question of whether inductive inferences should even be considered acts of “logic” or rationality at all; perhaps, it was suggested, our notion that we are making inductive inferences is merely a post hoc illusion generated by our brains. There is also the question of whether this process, which appears to span from the plant to the human, contains not a genetic difference, but merely a vast range of complexity with corresponding physiological processes – that there is some threshold of complexity beyond which this process can only be undertaken by a conscious mind (albeit no doubt working with unconscious percepts, biases, etc.). Perhaps, only the crudest nervous system is required for basic (homeostasis-related) predictions, whereas, say, a genius-level conscious mind is required to make the inductive inferences of a Warren Buffett.

This idea makes some sense, evolutionarily speaking. Our brains consume a lot of fuel; and no doubt, sustained, willed, conscious attention consumes more fuel than those mental operations which are automatic; and obviously, the more complex the task, the more sustained conscious attention is needed, so that the more difficult the problem we set out to solve, the more of our body's fuel is consumed. So, it makes sense that we might possess some form of non-conscious intelligence – intelligence in the sense of probability-estimate capacity based on experience, and the power to instigate appropriate regulating processes – which can take care of the most basic tasks, while our conscious minds would take care of the hardest tasks of inference, with (perhaps?) many possible levels of “intelligence”, with corresponding degrees of accessibility to consciousness, handling level-appropriate tasks, in between. And as is suggested by the non-conscious nature of our in-built homeostatic capacities, in the case of plants and very simple animal life this process could take place (as we observe it to do), entirely without an organ of cognition or consciousness at all.

One minor digression: it is difficult to understand how the brain might work, if not through some – even weak - form of modularity, as proposed by evolutionary psychology. And for all the hyperbole its champions might be guilty of, and despite the great degree of plasticity measurable in the brain, modularity is more amply evidenced, and explains a lot more, than the domain-general tabula rasa of the radical empiricists (Locke, Lewontin, the Roses, etc.). So, supposing that our brains are modular, I wonder if there might not be something like an initial triage faculty, some preliminary sorter of input, which operates beneath consciousness but is to some degree dependent upon, and calibrated by, conscious decisions and emotional commitments. In the interests of not only fuel-efficiency, but of things like pain avoidance or long term well-being, the TF would perform split-second evaluations of what input goes where in the brain, including which input will be presented to the more fuel-costly realm of the conscious mind, and which will be ignored as inconsequential (or too painful), and which will be incorporated unconsciously into a model of the world constantly seeking to correct itself, and decides which tasks will be solved, and in what order, and by which region of the brain, etc. I don't know of anyone who has suggested the existence of such a mechanism, so if anyone knows of such a suggestion, let me know so I can read about it. (Christof Koch has vaguely hinted at the feeling we all have of a homunculus, but I don't think he's ever gone beyond that.) Such a triage mechanism, to my mind, would explain an awful lot of things about how we observe minds to work.

Back to the “logical” justification of induction:

Given all I've mentioned above about conscious and non-conscious behaviours (everywhere there is life, there appears behaviour which seems to betray a process just like inductive inference), why should inductive inference be presumed to be a form of “logic”in the first place? Where basic versions don't even require a brain, whither the need for a “logical” justification.

Perhaps, even at the most advanced level, it might best be considered pre-logic; that is, deductive logic isn't even conceivable without the inductive inferences needed to form a syllogism's premises about the world. Maybe “logic” should be regarded as synonymous with “deductive logic”, and that be the end of it...?

It might be objected that this position is not so far from Popper's; but Popper didn't say anything about inductive inference comprising a pre-logic, or being virtually ubiquitous throughout nature – he claimed that nothing like it even existed. So, I don't think this idea, which again I don't have any particular allegiance to, and am just throwing out, is similar to Popper's. It acknowledges the existence of a process which we know as inductive inference, while just questioning whether it really requires a “logical” justification...

[_Tal Bachman]

Seems like this thread is dead...