We can only short circuit the various circularities, and directly demonstrate our ability to reason successfully, by using paragmatism and prediction...and that is only applicable to reasoning in some domains. The areas where they don’t work coincide with philosophical concerns.
The areas where they don’t work coincide with philosophical concerns.
As always, this is an interesting topic, because many of the philosophical concerns I can think of here end up being questions about metaphysics (i.e. what is the nature of stuff that lies beyond your epistemic ability to resolve the question) and I think there’s some reason perspective by which you might say that metaphysics “doesn’t matter”, i.e. it’s answers to questions that, while interesting, knowing the answer to them doesn’t change what actions you take in the world because we already can know enough to figure out practical answers that serve our within-world purposes.
It all depends on what you value. If you personally value knowing what things really are, then adopting instrumentalism or pragmatism will lose you some potential value.
I argue that for this it doesn’t, i.e. my case for how the problem of the criterion gets resolved is that you can’t help but be pragmatic because that’s a description of how epistemology is physically instantiated in our universe. The only thing you might lose value on is if you have some desire to resolve metaphysical questions and you stop short of resolving them then of course you will fail to receive the full value possible because you didn’t get the answer. I argue that getting such answers is impossible, but nonetheless trying to find them may be worthwhile to someone.
We can only short circuit the various circularities, and directly demonstrate our ability to reason successfully, by using paragmatism and prediction...and that is only applicable to reasoning in some domains. The areas where they don’t work coincide with philosophical concerns.
As always, this is an interesting topic, because many of the philosophical concerns I can think of here end up being questions about metaphysics (i.e. what is the nature of stuff that lies beyond your epistemic ability to resolve the question) and I think there’s some reason perspective by which you might say that metaphysics “doesn’t matter”, i.e. it’s answers to questions that, while interesting, knowing the answer to them doesn’t change what actions you take in the world because we already can know enough to figure out practical answers that serve our within-world purposes.
It all depends on what you value. If you personally value knowing what things really are, then adopting instrumentalism or pragmatism will lose you some potential value.
I argue that for this it doesn’t, i.e. my case for how the problem of the criterion gets resolved is that you can’t help but be pragmatic because that’s a description of how epistemology is physically instantiated in our universe. The only thing you might lose value on is if you have some desire to resolve metaphysical questions and you stop short of resolving them then of course you will fail to receive the full value possible because you didn’t get the answer. I argue that getting such answers is impossible, but nonetheless trying to find them may be worthwhile to someone.
Ok,but meta level arguments ar still subject to the problen of the criterion.