If we can prove that the Problem of the Criterion is a true problem, then the Problem of the Criterion is a false problem. Therefore, the Problem of the Criterion can never be proven to be a true problem.
Philosopher: “There is a way of thinking where you can never have a feeling of certainty. Not on any mental, physical, or social level. And I can teach it to you!”
Caveman: “Why would I want to learn that?”
Philosopher: ”...”
Perhaps one goal of the pragmatist is to avoid thinking about the Problem of the Criterion. It’s like “the Game” we used to play in grade school, where you lose the game by thinking about it. Kids would ambush each other by saying “you just lost the Game!” apropos of nothing.
If my take on this issue is wrong, I encourage proponents of the Problem of the Criterion to prove it!
This article and comment have used the word “true” so much that I’ve had that thing happen where when a word gets used too much it sort of loses all meaning and becomes a weird sequence of symbols or sounds. True. True true true. Truetrue true truetruetruetrue.
Philosopher: “There is a way of thinking where you can never have a feeling of certainty. Not on any mental, physical, or social level. And I can teach it to you!”
Caveman: “Why would I want to learn that?”
Rationalist: If it is impossible to be certain, I want to believe it is impossible to be certain.
Reading this, my guess is that you underestimate the importance of being pragmatic to a single purpose.
When you are pragmatic, you are pragmatic with respect to some purpose. Let’s suppose that purpose is truth. You’ll get by quite fine in the world if you do that.
Yet, there’s some things you’ll miss out on. For example, suppose you want to know what it is like to be intentionally deceitful, perhaps because you are dealing with a person who lies and would like to understand what it is like to be them. To fully do that you have to think the same sort of thoughts a deceitful person would and that would require knowing, even if only temporarily, something not maximally predictive of the world to the best of your ability. Thus you must be able to think with the purpose of deceiving others about something in order to embody such thought long enough to get some first hand experience with thinking that way.
I think this generalizes to deeply understanding what it is like to be someone who isn’t you. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say the typical mind fallacy exists because we are especially bad at considering the problem of the criterion and thinking thoughts as if we were serving someone else’s purpose rather than our own.
If we can prove that the Problem of the Criterion is a true problem, then the Problem of the Criterion is a false problem. Therefore, the Problem of the Criterion can never be proven to be a true problem.
Philosopher: “There is a way of thinking where you can never have a feeling of certainty. Not on any mental, physical, or social level. And I can teach it to you!”
Caveman: “Why would I want to learn that?”
Philosopher: ”...”
Perhaps one goal of the pragmatist is to avoid thinking about the Problem of the Criterion. It’s like “the Game” we used to play in grade school, where you lose the game by thinking about it. Kids would ambush each other by saying “you just lost the Game!” apropos of nothing.
If my take on this issue is wrong, I encourage proponents of the Problem of the Criterion to prove it!
This article and comment have used the word “true” so much that I’ve had that thing happen where when a word gets used too much it sort of loses all meaning and becomes a weird sequence of symbols or sounds. True. True true true. Truetrue true truetruetruetrue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation
Sounds like it’s time to become a caveman.
Rationalist: If it is impossible to be certain, I want to believe it is impossible to be certain.
What if it is impossible to believe the truth?
Reading this, my guess is that you underestimate the importance of being pragmatic to a single purpose.
When you are pragmatic, you are pragmatic with respect to some purpose. Let’s suppose that purpose is truth. You’ll get by quite fine in the world if you do that.
Yet, there’s some things you’ll miss out on. For example, suppose you want to know what it is like to be intentionally deceitful, perhaps because you are dealing with a person who lies and would like to understand what it is like to be them. To fully do that you have to think the same sort of thoughts a deceitful person would and that would require knowing, even if only temporarily, something not maximally predictive of the world to the best of your ability. Thus you must be able to think with the purpose of deceiving others about something in order to embody such thought long enough to get some first hand experience with thinking that way.
I think this generalizes to deeply understanding what it is like to be someone who isn’t you. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say the typical mind fallacy exists because we are especially bad at considering the problem of the criterion and thinking thoughts as if we were serving someone else’s purpose rather than our own.