This position is basically rationalism. Contemporary rationalists don’t deny the possibility of empirical knowledge. That would be a fairly absurd position to hold in the present. They say that there are also non-empirical sources of knowledge. Empiricists deny the existence of non-empirical sources of knowledge.
Suppose I flip a coin 999 times and it comes up heads.
I then flip it a hundredth time but don’t look at it.
I would be comfortable saying I know without looking that it came up heads. (Sure, there’s a chance I’m wrong. There’s a chance I’m wrong if I look, too. If “knowledge” denotes the state of absolute certainty, we don’t ever know anything. It makes more sense to interpret “knowledge” as denoting greater-than-threshold confidence.)
Would a contemporary empiricist say that I don’t know that, because I didn’t see it? That I know this, but it’s not novel information? That it’s novel information, but I obtain it through sensory experience? (E.g., observing the previous 999 flips) Other?
I think the contemporary empiricist would say that all the information you have about the thousandth flip comes from your past sensory experience—your experience of the previous 999 flips plus other relevant experience (such as, say, experiences that form the basis for your beliefs about the base rate of unfair coins). The extent to which your belief about the thousandth flip justifiably differs from maximum entropy (or zero information) is entirely attributable to your prior experiences.
OK, so an contemporary empiricist doesn’t deny the possibility of inference. Good.
Does a contemporary empiricist deny the possibility of inference engines being constructed in ways that bias them towards certain conclusions? E.g., that two people might be born with their brains wired such that, given the same sensory experiences, one of them infers A and the other infers B? (In both cases, presumably, the information about A or B comes from past sensory experience, it’s just that the process for getting one from the other differs.)
If not, then I no longer have a crisp sense of what contemporary empiricists and rationalists actually disagree on.
Like I said in another comment, I identify as a rationalist because empiricism, construed literally, does not allow for informative priors, which makes learning impossible. I’m pretty sure, though, that if you brought this up to a philosopher who identifies as an empiricist, the response would be “Well of course that’s not what I mean by empiricism. Informative priors are fine.” But then, like you, I’m not so sure how to interpret the rationalism/empiricism distinction.
Given your definitions of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism,’ an empiricist would need to assert that informative priors, if they exist, either are not “novel information about the world” or are novel information that we derive from experience. We aren’t perfect Bayesian reasoners, and you haven’t defined ‘information,’ so this doesn’t seem perfectly open-and-cut to me.
One approach an empiricist could take would be to deny that our primordial priors (i.e., our earliest expectations), in themselves, constitute information about the world; perhaps we can use them as a handy framework for genuinely informative research, but the framework itself is not knowledge,
Another approach would be to deny that we have expectations before possessing any sense-perception; perhaps neurological development relies extensively upon sensory input from our environments before anything as cognitively complex as ‘expectation’ or ‘belief’ enters the picture.
I call myself a rationalist because learning is impossible with maximum entropy priors, so if we can learn about the world through experience, we must start out with informative priors, which means we have some information about the world that is not attributable to experience. However, I suspect that this kind of position would not be recognized as rationalism by many philosophers.
A more traditional rationalist claim is that reason can provide us with novel information about the world. As an example, consider a Platonist who believes that the integers actually have some kind of independent, objective existence, and aren’t just the elements of a useful formal system constructed by humans. In that case, someone who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem would have discovered a fact about certain objects in the world, but not through sensory experience.
Isn’t this what EY argues for at the end of QM sequence? He seems to think there are ways of knowing things when empirical evidence is insufficient to resolve the dispute.
Whereas I say that EY’s position in the QM sequence would be right—if rationalism were more correct than empiricism.
Of course, I think your position on “knowing” is much too practical :) The fact that resolving physical realism vs. anti-realism doesn’t pay rent at the engineer’s bench does not mean it doesn’t matter to Science. Whereas you are a hardcore instrumentalist.
I’ll grant you that rationalism vs. empiricism is not a well-formed question if one is an instrumentalist.
Well, we agree on something. Just to clarify, my instrumentalist approach comes from the frustration of not being able to argue “which model is correct?” without tying correctness to testability. I was a naive realist a year or so ago, before I started reading this forum regularly.
I think that the physical realism sides would make different predictions about the process of scientific progress. So we compare those predictions to the actual data from the history of science. I happen to think Kuhn and Feyerabend make the better argument about how to interpret the history, so I’m an anti-realist. If one thinks Kuhn and Feyerabend made a mess of the history, realism is a much more appealing position. I almost think pragmatist didn’t go far enough in his explanation of the difference.
This position is basically rationalism. Contemporary rationalists don’t deny the possibility of empirical knowledge. That would be a fairly absurd position to hold in the present. They say that there are also non-empirical sources of knowledge. Empiricists deny the existence of non-empirical sources of knowledge.
Suppose I flip a coin 999 times and it comes up heads. I then flip it a hundredth time but don’t look at it.
I would be comfortable saying I know without looking that it came up heads. (Sure, there’s a chance I’m wrong. There’s a chance I’m wrong if I look, too. If “knowledge” denotes the state of absolute certainty, we don’t ever know anything. It makes more sense to interpret “knowledge” as denoting greater-than-threshold confidence.)
Would a contemporary empiricist say that I don’t know that, because I didn’t see it?
That I know this, but it’s not novel information?
That it’s novel information, but I obtain it through sensory experience? (E.g., observing the previous 999 flips)
Other?
I think the contemporary empiricist would say that all the information you have about the thousandth flip comes from your past sensory experience—your experience of the previous 999 flips plus other relevant experience (such as, say, experiences that form the basis for your beliefs about the base rate of unfair coins). The extent to which your belief about the thousandth flip justifiably differs from maximum entropy (or zero information) is entirely attributable to your prior experiences.
OK, so an contemporary empiricist doesn’t deny the possibility of inference. Good.
Does a contemporary empiricist deny the possibility of inference engines being constructed in ways that bias them towards certain conclusions? E.g., that two people might be born with their brains wired such that, given the same sensory experiences, one of them infers A and the other infers B? (In both cases, presumably, the information about A or B comes from past sensory experience, it’s just that the process for getting one from the other differs.)
If not, then I no longer have a crisp sense of what contemporary empiricists and rationalists actually disagree on.
Like I said in another comment, I identify as a rationalist because empiricism, construed literally, does not allow for informative priors, which makes learning impossible. I’m pretty sure, though, that if you brought this up to a philosopher who identifies as an empiricist, the response would be “Well of course that’s not what I mean by empiricism. Informative priors are fine.” But then, like you, I’m not so sure how to interpret the rationalism/empiricism distinction.
Given your definitions of ‘rationalism’ and ‘empiricism,’ an empiricist would need to assert that informative priors, if they exist, either are not “novel information about the world” or are novel information that we derive from experience. We aren’t perfect Bayesian reasoners, and you haven’t defined ‘information,’ so this doesn’t seem perfectly open-and-cut to me.
One approach an empiricist could take would be to deny that our primordial priors (i.e., our earliest expectations), in themselves, constitute information about the world; perhaps we can use them as a handy framework for genuinely informative research, but the framework itself is not knowledge,
Another approach would be to deny that we have expectations before possessing any sense-perception; perhaps neurological development relies extensively upon sensory input from our environments before anything as cognitively complex as ‘expectation’ or ‘belief’ enters the picture.
Or one could adopt a mixed strategy.
What are those, besides instincts? Any examples?
I call myself a rationalist because learning is impossible with maximum entropy priors, so if we can learn about the world through experience, we must start out with informative priors, which means we have some information about the world that is not attributable to experience. However, I suspect that this kind of position would not be recognized as rationalism by many philosophers.
A more traditional rationalist claim is that reason can provide us with novel information about the world. As an example, consider a Platonist who believes that the integers actually have some kind of independent, objective existence, and aren’t just the elements of a useful formal system constructed by humans. In that case, someone who proved Fermat’s Last Theorem would have discovered a fact about certain objects in the world, but not through sensory experience.
Isn’t this what EY argues for at the end of QM sequence? He seems to think there are ways of knowing things when empirical evidence is insufficient to resolve the dispute.
Right, that’s where he loses me every time. We disagree on what “knowing” means.
Whereas I say that EY’s position in the QM sequence would be right—if rationalism were more correct than empiricism.
Of course, I think your position on “knowing” is much too practical :) The fact that resolving physical realism vs. anti-realism doesn’t pay rent at the engineer’s bench does not mean it doesn’t matter to Science. Whereas you are a hardcore instrumentalist.
I’ll grant you that rationalism vs. empiricism is not a well-formed question if one is an instrumentalist.
Well, we agree on something. Just to clarify, my instrumentalist approach comes from the frustration of not being able to argue “which model is correct?” without tying correctness to testability. I was a naive realist a year or so ago, before I started reading this forum regularly.
Sure—falsifiability is the key issue.
I think that the physical realism sides would make different predictions about the process of scientific progress. So we compare those predictions to the actual data from the history of science. I happen to think Kuhn and Feyerabend make the better argument about how to interpret the history, so I’m an anti-realist. If one thinks Kuhn and Feyerabend made a mess of the history, realism is a much more appealing position. I almost think pragmatist didn’t go far enough in his explanation of the difference.
Is there a way to unambiguously test this assertion?