How, in practice, does one treat that sort of knowledge as provisional and tentative?
A belief being tentative is a property of your algorithm-for-deciding-things, not what a state of mind feels like from the inside. You can get a lot of mileage by e.g. (a) independently revisiting tentative claims with small probability, (b) responding appropriately when someone points out to you that a load-bearing tentative assumption might be wrong.
I don’t think this question should be expected to have a really short answer, even if there are ironclad collective epistemology protocols. It’s like saying “how, in practice, do people securely communicate over untrusted internet infrastructure?” There is a great answer, but even once you have a hint that it’s possible it will still take quite a lot of work to figure out exactly how the protocol works.
Do we actually have a disagreement here? I’m saying that actually-existing humans can’t actually do this. You seem to be saying that it’s conceivable that future humans might develop a protocol for doing this, and it’s worth exploring.
These can both be true! But in the meantime we’d need to explore this with our actually-existing minds, not the ones we might like to have, so it’s worth figuring out what the heck we’re actually doing.
I agree that it would take some work to figure out how to do this well.
I would say “figure out how to do this well” is at a similar level of complexity to “figure out what the heck we’re actually doing.” The “what should we do” question is more likely to have a clean and actionable answer. The “what do we do” question is more relevant to understanding the world now at the object level.
A belief being tentative is a property of your algorithm-for-deciding-things, not what a state of mind feels like from the inside. You can get a lot of mileage by e.g. (a) independently revisiting tentative claims with small probability, (b) responding appropriately when someone points out to you that a load-bearing tentative assumption might be wrong.
I don’t think this question should be expected to have a really short answer, even if there are ironclad collective epistemology protocols. It’s like saying “how, in practice, do people securely communicate over untrusted internet infrastructure?” There is a great answer, but even once you have a hint that it’s possible it will still take quite a lot of work to figure out exactly how the protocol works.
Do we actually have a disagreement here? I’m saying that actually-existing humans can’t actually do this. You seem to be saying that it’s conceivable that future humans might develop a protocol for doing this, and it’s worth exploring.
These can both be true! But in the meantime we’d need to explore this with our actually-existing minds, not the ones we might like to have, so it’s worth figuring out what the heck we’re actually doing.
I agree that it would take some work to figure out how to do this well.
I would say “figure out how to do this well” is at a similar level of complexity to “figure out what the heck we’re actually doing.” The “what should we do” question is more likely to have a clean and actionable answer. The “what do we do” question is more relevant to understanding the world now at the object level.