I may be mad, but I actually think of Popper more or less in the same breath as Bayesianism—modus tollens and reductio (the main methods of Popperian “critical rationalism”—CR basically says that the reductio is the model of all successful empirical reasoning) just seem to me to be special cases of Bayesianism. The idea with both (as I see it) is that we start where we are and get to the truth by shaving away untruths, by testing our ideas to destruction and going with what’s left standing because we’ve got nothing better left standing—that seems to me the basic gist of both philosophies.
I’m also fond of the idea that knowledge is always conjecture, and that belief has nothing to do with knowledge (and knowledge can occasionally be accidental). Knowledge is just the “aperiodic crystals” of language in its manifest forms (ink on paper, sounds out of a mouth, coding, or whatever), which, by convention (“language games”), represent or model reality either accurately or not, regardless of psychological state of belief.
Furthermore, while I’m on my high horse, Bayesianism is conjectural deductive reasoning—neither “subjective” nor “objective” approaches have anything to do with it. It doesn’t “update beliefs” it updates, modifies, discards, conjectures.
IOW, you take a punt, a bet, a conjecture (none of which have anything to do with belief) at how things are, objectively. The punt is itself in the form of a “language crystal”, objectively out there in reality, in some embodied form, which is something embedded in reality that conventionally models reality, as above—again, nothing to do with belief.
In this context, truth and objectivity (in another sense) are ideals—things we’re aiming for. It may be the case that there is no true proposition, but when we say we have a probably true proposition, what that means is that we have a ranking of conjectures against each other, in a ratio, and the most probable is the most provable (the one that can be best corroborated—in the Popperian sense—by evidence). That’s all.
I may be mad, but I actually think of Popper more or less in the same breath as Bayesianism—modus tollens and reductio (the main methods of Popperian “critical rationalism”—CR basically says that the reductio is the model of all successful empirical reasoning) just seem to me to be special cases of Bayesianism. The idea with both (as I see it) is that we start where we are and get to the truth by shaving away untruths, by testing our ideas to destruction and going with what’s left standing because we’ve got nothing better left standing—that seems to me the basic gist of both philosophies.
I’m also fond of the idea that knowledge is always conjecture, and that belief has nothing to do with knowledge (and knowledge can occasionally be accidental). Knowledge is just the “aperiodic crystals” of language in its manifest forms (ink on paper, sounds out of a mouth, coding, or whatever), which, by convention (“language games”), represent or model reality either accurately or not, regardless of psychological state of belief.
Furthermore, while I’m on my high horse, Bayesianism is conjectural deductive reasoning—neither “subjective” nor “objective” approaches have anything to do with it. It doesn’t “update beliefs” it updates, modifies, discards, conjectures.
IOW, you take a punt, a bet, a conjecture (none of which have anything to do with belief) at how things are, objectively. The punt is itself in the form of a “language crystal”, objectively out there in reality, in some embodied form, which is something embedded in reality that conventionally models reality, as above—again, nothing to do with belief.
In this context, truth and objectivity (in another sense) are ideals—things we’re aiming for. It may be the case that there is no true proposition, but when we say we have a probably true proposition, what that means is that we have a ranking of conjectures against each other, in a ratio, and the most probable is the most provable (the one that can be best corroborated—in the Popperian sense—by evidence). That’s all.