Lots of good depate going on. I printed out the state of things as I left work, answered it all off-line, and have now come back in to post; but found lots more to deal with. Its late, so I'll post what I have, and address the rest tomorrow.
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Thanks for all of your responses; the genuine, and the flippant. To respond in order of receipt:
Jekyll: We agree that the format is bizarre. I’ve written it thus out of desperation, having tried, and failed, with many other formats. I admit to assuming shared data and prior beliefs. In the complete absence of such things no communication would be possible. As to ‘a common derivative process’, I am not assuming this. I am asserting – in Point #3 – that this is logically entrained by Point #1. I hold that Point #1 rests upon both observation and logical necessity.
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Mercutio: ‘Operationalize!’: OK. Let’s break ‘Step 1’ down into sub steps:
1A. Get some group of sufficiently like minded* people to understand what I am trying to say.
1B. Refine it, on the basis of their feedback, into a form that will be understandable by somewhat less like minded people.
1C. (to run in parallel with 1B): Bring it to the attention of our movement’s presently accepted spokespersons. (They are all far better writers then I am, and so could provide a lot of help with 1B).
1D. (general spread of the meme): The debate spreads on the ‘net, and spills over into other media. The number of people who don’t use the concept ‘truth’ in their thought, speech, or writing – and who are willing to ask those who do use it to explain what they mean by it – grows.
How will we know its working? All forms of irrational knowledge will begin to decline. As the independent basis from which we have been maintaining irrational proposals in direct opposition to rational proposals is eroded, the fundamental silliness of such proposals will become increasingly apparent. Die hard theists (for example) will always be with us – in that same sense that some flat earth believers will always be with us – but they will no longer enjoy an effective majority.
* Here, of course, is ‘the rub’. There may simply not be such a group of people. Or, in alternative statement, what I’m trying to say may be too far from the main stream (in the sense being suggested by my opening Popper quote) to be communicable. This would be a real bitch for me.
PS: Great forum name. My favorite – albeit by a narrow margin – of Shakespeare’s characters.
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Phil: Thanks for trying. But ‘just one point at a time’ is exactly what I was trying to do (with my twelve), and discussing them is what, I hope, we are doing here.
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Drkitten: Your lack of understanding does not mean that there is nothing to understand. The world would perhaps be a better place if all significant ideas could be expressed so as to be comprehensible to your niece. For one thing we could, presumably, go ahead and close down all of our universities. But then again, and to be honest, I rather like universities. I’d suggest some Rousseau. You’ll like him.
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JamesDillon: I agree with your statement of Hume’s position, but not with its final sentence. He didn’t say that science is logically invalid. He said that it is not, in any qualitative sense, superior to the rest of our knowledge. He showed the logical invalidity of the principle upon which the scientists of his day were trying to claim such a distinction. We are the intellectual descendents of those scientists. Our ‘parents’ ardently desired the distinction because they wanted their own special/superior knowledge form as a position from which to oppose the special/superior knowledge form of those who seek to maintain explicitly irrational knowledge. They wanted an objective form of ‘truth’ (conclusively verified through direct and repeatable physical observations) as a bastion from which to fight against the predominant position of religious and ideological subjective ‘truth’ (which is conclusively verified – according to its proponents – through reference to ‘authority’ in general, and ‘holy books’ in particular). Hume’s exposure of induction was therefore a terrible blow to our side. Full understanding of his position logically undercuts all forms of ‘truth’. But this hardly fazed our opposition because A. They didn’t understand it, and B. Their knowledge is already conveniently divorced from reason and logic. As to how bad it was: here’s Russell, writhing only 60 years ago: “It is therefore important to discover whether there is any answer to Hume within a philosophy that is wholly or mainly empirical. If not, there is no intellectual difference between sanity and insanity. The lunatic who believes that he is a poached egg is to be condemned solely on the ground that he is in a minority, or rather – since we must not assume democracy – on the ground that the government does not agree with him.”. So, what was Popper’s answer? I don’t think that I can do much better, in a statement of equal or shorter length, then I have already done in Point #9 of the essay and its second (**) endnote. But, to show willing, I will cut and paste a single endnote from the notorious 50 page version of “Truth?”
To attempt here a very brief treatment of this complex issue: Hume showed that induction was unsatisfactory because it could not be logically inferred from any other principle; or, of course, from itself. To précis Popper’s demonstration of the problem (which seems more direct than Hume’s): We may see any number of white swans, over any number of years of observation, but we cannot from this be logically justified in making the general statement “all swans are white”. To do so we would need to infer from some other principles (about the pre established uniformity of swans, and/or about the future exactly resembling the past) which would need to be inferred from still more fundamental principles…...and so on. But let us observe just one black swan, and we can now logically make a useful generalization: “Not all swans are white”. In acceptance of this, Popper’s simple and brilliant proposal to solve Hume’s problem was essentially to abandon the pretence of “proving” any of our scientific knowledge. He revised Science’s basic methodological statement to require potential disprovability, rather than proof, as the most essential characteristic for any proposed item of scientific knowledge. He said, in effect: “Let scientific knowledge be anything, and from any source - induction, deduction, dreams about twisted ladders, or tail eating snakes, we don’t care - if it can be seen to be logically suggested by some physical data, and to have some definite predictive power (which would mean: to be state-able in sufficiently clear terms as to identify at least some physical outcomes that would constitute disproof). To complete this we need only make explicit the obvious caveats: 1. That it has not yet been disproved, and 2. That it can be shown to be better overall, in regard to the two essential characteristics just outlined, than any other logically exclusive knowledge proposal”. This is both a paraphrase of Popper, to the best of my understanding, and the best statement that I can make of the valid methodology of science. There are two important things to be said about it: 1. That it clarified and thus somewhat accelerated scientific progress, but did not lead to any fundamental changes (from which we may infer that it was more a statement of what science already was - though we couldn’t previously define it so well - than of what it needed to become). 2. That it explicitly and permanently recognized all scientific knowledge as tentative and provisional, i.e. as “merely human”.
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Black Fox: I am lousy at Scrabble, and crossword puzzles. My mind works in a very slow and linear way.
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Soapy Sam: I have no indication of having succeeded yet. Possibly with 4 or 5 people (a few friends, and some respondents on the Brights’ board) but that will hardly get the job done.
I will almost certainly have to do another re-write. But I will continue to respond to this thread for as long as its debate remains genuine and interesting.
It will not do either of us any good for me to respond to your 12 specific responses. I would ask you, with the greatest respect, to reread my opening Popper quote. What it refers to is exactly what is happening here. There is – drkitten notwithstanding – a simple point onto which all 12 of mine converge. That point is what you are missing. But it is my inadequacy in communicating it, rather than your capacity for understanding, that is at fault. Maybe it will jog the tumblers of the lock just enough if I address your Point 4 response: We are not at all in disagreement about your statement. We agree that it is an excellent knowledge statement, in that it is extremely rational and extremely well supported by observation. Where we apparently disagree is in your presentation of it as a ‘truth’. We both embrace it as knowledge, for the reasons that I hope we have just agreed upon. My proposal is that we should continue to hold it and propagate it solely upon the basis of those reasons. If you mean by ‘truth’ ‘something more then those reasons’ then I am inviting you to tell me what the ‘something more’ is. If you do not mean ‘something more’ then I am inviting you to delete the redundant concept ‘truth’. At best it can be contributing only confusion to your thinking.
Also: Good to meet you, and thanks for the welcome.
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Jekyll: I’m not familiar with Laplance’s law. Will look it up as soon as I exit this reply mode, and revert to you soon.
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Nancarrow: Thank you for your reply and support. I look forward to talking again after or during the weekend. If you are unfazed by Hume and Popper, and wear the glasses!, then I think that we’re going to get along well. We may disagree, but if so then I suspect that it will at least be an interesting disagreement.
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MRC Hans: If you didn’t make it through the first part, then the last part would definitely not have made sense. You could always try again.
