So, how do Popperians decide? They conjecture an answer, e.g. “yes”. Actually, they make many conjectures, e.g. also “no”. Then they criticize the conjectures, and make more conjectures. So for example I would criticize “yes” for not providing enough explanatory detail about why it’s a good idea. Thus “yes” would be rejected, but a variant of it like “yes, because nuclear power plants are safe, clean, and efficient, and all the criticisms of them are from silly luddites” would be better. If I didn’t understand all the references to longer arguments being made there, I would criticize it and ask for the details. Meanwhile the “no” answer and its variants will get refuted by criticism. Sometimes entire infinite categories of conjectures will be refuted by a criticism, e.g. the anti-nuclear people might start arguing with conspiracy theories. By providing a general purpose argument against all conspiracy theories, I could deal with all their arguments of that type. Does this illustrate the general idea for you?
Almost, but you seem to have left out the rather important detail of how actually make the decision. Based on the process of criticizing conjectures you’ve described so far, it seems that there are two basic routes you can take to finish the decision process once the critical smoke has cleared.
First, you can declare that, since there is no such thing as confirmation, it turns out that no conjecture is better or worse than any other. In this way you don’t actually make a decision and the problem remains unsolved.
Second, you can choose to go with the conjecture that best weathered the criticisms you were able to muster. That’s fine, but then it’s not clear that you’ve done anything different from what a Bayesian would have done—you’ve simply avoided explicitly talking about things like probabilities and priors.
Which of these is a more accurate characterization of the Popperian decision process? Or is it something radically different from these two altogether?
When you have exactly one non-refuted theory, you go with that.
The other cases are more complicated and difficult to understand.
Suppose I gave you the answer to the other cases, and we talked about it enough for you to understand it. What would you change your mind about? What would you concede?
If i convinced you of this one single issue (that there is a method for making the decision), would you follow up with a thousand other objections to Popperian epistemology, or would we have gotten somewhere?
If you have lots of other objections you are interested in, I would suggest you just accept for now that we have a method and focus on the other issues first.
[option 1] since there is no such thing as confirmation, it turns out that no conjecture is better or worse than any other.
But some are criticized and some aren’t.
[option 2] conjecture that best weathered the criticisms you were able to muster
But how is that to be judged?
No, we always go with uncriticized ideas (which may be close variants of ideas that were criticized). Even the terminology is very tricky here—the English language is not well adapted to expressing these ideas. (In particular, the concept “uncriticized” is a very substantive one with a lot of meaning, and the word for it may be misleading, but other words are even worse. And the straightforward meaning is OK for present purposes, but may be problematic in future discussion.).
Or is it something radically different from these two altogether?
Yes, different. Both of these are justificationist ways of thinking. They consider how much justification each theory has. The first one rejects a standard source of justification, does not replace it, and ends up stuck. The second one replaces it, and ends up, as you say, reasonably similar to Bayesianism. It still uses the same basic method of tallying up how much of some good thing (which we call justification) each theory has, and then judging by what has the most.
Popperian epistemology does not justify. It uses criticism for a different purpose: a criticism is an explanation of a mistake. By finding mistakes, and explaining what the mistakes are, and conjecturing better ideas which we think won’t have those mistakes, we learn and improve our knowledge.
If i convinced you of this one single issue (that there is a method for making the decision), would you follow up with a thousand other objections to Popperian epistemology, or would we have gotten somewhere?
Yes, we will have gotten somewhere. This issue is my primary criticism of Popperian epistemology. That is, given what I understand about the set of ideas, it is not clear to me how we would go about making practical scientific decisions. With that said, I can’t reasonably guarantee that I will not have later objections as well before we’ve even had the discussion!
So let me see if I’m understanding this correctly. What we are looking for is the one conjecture which appears to be completely impervious to any criticism that we can muster against it, given our current knowledge. Once we have found such a conjecture, we—I don’t want to say “assume that it’s true,” because that’s probably not correct—we behave as if it were true until it finally is criticized and, hopefully, replaced by a new conjecture. Is that basically right?
I’m not really seeing how this is fundamentally anti-justificationist. It seems to me that the Popperian epistemology still depends on a form of justification, but that it relies on a sort of boolean all-or-nothing justification rather than allowing graded degrees of justification. For example, when we say something like, “in order to make a decision, we need to have a guiding theory which is currently impervious to criticism” (my current understanding of Popper’s idea, roughly illustrated), isn’t this just another way of saying: “the fact that this theory is currently impervious to criticism is what justifies our reliance on it in making this decision?”
In short, isn’t imperviousness to criticism a type of justification in itself?
Yes, we will have gotten somewhere. This issue is my primary criticism of Popperian epistemology.
OK then :-) Should we go somewhere else to discuss, rather than heavily nested comments? Would a new discussion topic page be the right place?
Is that basically right?
That is the general idea (but incomplete).
The reason we behave as if it’s true is that it’s the best option available. All the other theories are criticized (= we have an explanation of what we think is a mistake/flaw in them). We wouldn’t want to act on an idea that we (thought we) saw a mistake in, over one we don’t think we see any mistake with—we should use what (fallible) knowledge we have.
A justification is a reason a conjecture is good. Popperian epistemology basically has no such thing. There are no positive arguments, only negative. What we have instead of positive arguments is explanations. These are to help people understand an idea (what it says, what problem it is intended to solve, how it solves it, why they might like it, etc...), but they do not justify the theory, they play an advisory role (also note: they pretty much are the theory, they are the content that we care about in general).
One reason that not being criticized isn’t a justification is that saying it is gets you a regress problem. So let’s not say that! The other reason is: what would that be adding as compared with not saying it? It’s not helpful (and if you give specific details/claims of how it is helpful, which are in line with the justificationist tradition, then I can give you specific criticisms of those).
Terminology isn’t terribly important. David Deutsch used the word justification in his explanation of this in the dialog chapter of The Fabric of Reality (highly recommended). I don’t like to use it. But the important thing is not to mean anything that causes a regress problem, or to expect justification to come from authority, or various other mistakes. If you want to take the Popperian conception of a good theory and label it “justified” it doesn’t matter so much.
Should we go somewhere else to discuss, rather than heavily nested comments? Would a new discussion topic page be the right place?
I agree that the nested comment format is a little cumbersome (in fact, this is a bit of a complaint of mine about the LW format in general), but it’s not clear that this discussion warrants an entirely new topic.
Terminology isn’t terribly important . . . If you want to take the Popperian conception of a good theory and label it “justified” it doesn’t matter so much.
Okay. So what is really at issue here is whether or not the Popperian conception of a good theory, whatever we call that, leads to regress problems similar to those experienced by “justificationist” systems.
It seems to me that it does! You claim that the particular feature of justificationist systems that leads to a regress is their reliance on positive arguments. Popper’s system is said to avoid this issue because it denies positive arguments and instead only recognizes negative arguments, which circumvents the regress issue so long as we accept modus tollens. But I claim that Popper’s system does in fact rely on positive arguments at least implicitly, and that this opens the system to regress problems. Let me illustrate.
According to Popper, we ought to act on whatever theory we have that has not been falsified. But that itself represents a positive argument in favor of any non-falsified theory! We might ask: okay, but why ought we to act only on theories which have not been falsified? We could probably come up with a pretty reasonable answer to this question—but as you can see, the regress has begun.
We might ask: okay, but why ought we to act only on theories which have not been falsified? We could probably come up with a pretty reasonable answer to this question—but as you can see, the regress has begun.
No regress has begun. I already answered why:
The reason we behave as if it’s true is that it’s the best option available. All the other theories are criticized (= we have an explanation of what we think is a mistake/flaw in them). We wouldn’t want to act on an idea that we (thought we) saw a mistake in, over one we don’t think we see any mistake with—we should use what (fallible) knowledge we have.
Try to regress me.
It is possible, if you want, to create a regress of some kind which isn’t the same one and isn’t important. The crucial issue is: are the questions that continue the regress any good? Do they have some kind of valid point to them? If not, then I won’t regard it as a real regress problem of the same type. You’ll probably wonder how that’s evaluated, but, well, it’s not such a big deal. We’ll quickly get to the point where your attempts to create regress look silly to you. That’s different than the regresses inductivists face where it’s the person trying to defend induction who runs out of stuff to say.
Almost, but you seem to have left out the rather important detail of how actually make the decision. Based on the process of criticizing conjectures you’ve described so far, it seems that there are two basic routes you can take to finish the decision process once the critical smoke has cleared.
First, you can declare that, since there is no such thing as confirmation, it turns out that no conjecture is better or worse than any other. In this way you don’t actually make a decision and the problem remains unsolved.
Second, you can choose to go with the conjecture that best weathered the criticisms you were able to muster. That’s fine, but then it’s not clear that you’ve done anything different from what a Bayesian would have done—you’ve simply avoided explicitly talking about things like probabilities and priors.
Which of these is a more accurate characterization of the Popperian decision process? Or is it something radically different from these two altogether?
When you have exactly one non-refuted theory, you go with that.
The other cases are more complicated and difficult to understand.
Suppose I gave you the answer to the other cases, and we talked about it enough for you to understand it. What would you change your mind about? What would you concede?
If i convinced you of this one single issue (that there is a method for making the decision), would you follow up with a thousand other objections to Popperian epistemology, or would we have gotten somewhere?
If you have lots of other objections you are interested in, I would suggest you just accept for now that we have a method and focus on the other issues first.
But some are criticized and some aren’t.
But how is that to be judged?
No, we always go with uncriticized ideas (which may be close variants of ideas that were criticized). Even the terminology is very tricky here—the English language is not well adapted to expressing these ideas. (In particular, the concept “uncriticized” is a very substantive one with a lot of meaning, and the word for it may be misleading, but other words are even worse. And the straightforward meaning is OK for present purposes, but may be problematic in future discussion.).
Yes, different. Both of these are justificationist ways of thinking. They consider how much justification each theory has. The first one rejects a standard source of justification, does not replace it, and ends up stuck. The second one replaces it, and ends up, as you say, reasonably similar to Bayesianism. It still uses the same basic method of tallying up how much of some good thing (which we call justification) each theory has, and then judging by what has the most.
Popperian epistemology does not justify. It uses criticism for a different purpose: a criticism is an explanation of a mistake. By finding mistakes, and explaining what the mistakes are, and conjecturing better ideas which we think won’t have those mistakes, we learn and improve our knowledge.
Yes, we will have gotten somewhere. This issue is my primary criticism of Popperian epistemology. That is, given what I understand about the set of ideas, it is not clear to me how we would go about making practical scientific decisions. With that said, I can’t reasonably guarantee that I will not have later objections as well before we’ve even had the discussion!
So let me see if I’m understanding this correctly. What we are looking for is the one conjecture which appears to be completely impervious to any criticism that we can muster against it, given our current knowledge. Once we have found such a conjecture, we—I don’t want to say “assume that it’s true,” because that’s probably not correct—we behave as if it were true until it finally is criticized and, hopefully, replaced by a new conjecture. Is that basically right?
I’m not really seeing how this is fundamentally anti-justificationist. It seems to me that the Popperian epistemology still depends on a form of justification, but that it relies on a sort of boolean all-or-nothing justification rather than allowing graded degrees of justification. For example, when we say something like, “in order to make a decision, we need to have a guiding theory which is currently impervious to criticism” (my current understanding of Popper’s idea, roughly illustrated), isn’t this just another way of saying: “the fact that this theory is currently impervious to criticism is what justifies our reliance on it in making this decision?”
In short, isn’t imperviousness to criticism a type of justification in itself?
OK then :-) Should we go somewhere else to discuss, rather than heavily nested comments? Would a new discussion topic page be the right place?
That is the general idea (but incomplete).
The reason we behave as if it’s true is that it’s the best option available. All the other theories are criticized (= we have an explanation of what we think is a mistake/flaw in them). We wouldn’t want to act on an idea that we (thought we) saw a mistake in, over one we don’t think we see any mistake with—we should use what (fallible) knowledge we have.
A justification is a reason a conjecture is good. Popperian epistemology basically has no such thing. There are no positive arguments, only negative. What we have instead of positive arguments is explanations. These are to help people understand an idea (what it says, what problem it is intended to solve, how it solves it, why they might like it, etc...), but they do not justify the theory, they play an advisory role (also note: they pretty much are the theory, they are the content that we care about in general).
One reason that not being criticized isn’t a justification is that saying it is gets you a regress problem. So let’s not say that! The other reason is: what would that be adding as compared with not saying it? It’s not helpful (and if you give specific details/claims of how it is helpful, which are in line with the justificationist tradition, then I can give you specific criticisms of those).
Terminology isn’t terribly important. David Deutsch used the word justification in his explanation of this in the dialog chapter of The Fabric of Reality (highly recommended). I don’t like to use it. But the important thing is not to mean anything that causes a regress problem, or to expect justification to come from authority, or various other mistakes. If you want to take the Popperian conception of a good theory and label it “justified” it doesn’t matter so much.
I agree that the nested comment format is a little cumbersome (in fact, this is a bit of a complaint of mine about the LW format in general), but it’s not clear that this discussion warrants an entirely new topic.
Okay. So what is really at issue here is whether or not the Popperian conception of a good theory, whatever we call that, leads to regress problems similar to those experienced by “justificationist” systems.
It seems to me that it does! You claim that the particular feature of justificationist systems that leads to a regress is their reliance on positive arguments. Popper’s system is said to avoid this issue because it denies positive arguments and instead only recognizes negative arguments, which circumvents the regress issue so long as we accept modus tollens. But I claim that Popper’s system does in fact rely on positive arguments at least implicitly, and that this opens the system to regress problems. Let me illustrate.
According to Popper, we ought to act on whatever theory we have that has not been falsified. But that itself represents a positive argument in favor of any non-falsified theory! We might ask: okay, but why ought we to act only on theories which have not been falsified? We could probably come up with a pretty reasonable answer to this question—but as you can see, the regress has begun.
I think it’s a big topic. Began answering your question here:
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/551/popperian_decision_making/
No regress has begun. I already answered why:
Try to regress me.
It is possible, if you want, to create a regress of some kind which isn’t the same one and isn’t important. The crucial issue is: are the questions that continue the regress any good? Do they have some kind of valid point to them? If not, then I won’t regard it as a real regress problem of the same type. You’ll probably wonder how that’s evaluated, but, well, it’s not such a big deal. We’ll quickly get to the point where your attempts to create regress look silly to you. That’s different than the regresses inductivists face where it’s the person trying to defend induction who runs out of stuff to say.