If you try hard enough you can refuse to think at all.
Popperian epistemology helps people learn who want to. It doesn’t provide a set of rules that, if you follow them exactly while trying your best not to make progress, then you will learn anyway. We only learn much when we seriously try to, with good intentions.
You can always create trivial regresses, e.g. by asking “why?” infinitely many times. But that’s different than the following regress:
If you assert “theories should be justified, or they are crap”
and you assert “theories are justified in one way: when they are supported by a theory which is itself justified”
Then you have a serious problem to deal with which is not the same type as asking “why?” forever.
Things which reject entire categories is not a precise way to state what theories should be rejected. You are correct that the version I wrote can be improved to be clearer and more precise. One of the issues is whether a criticism engages with the substance of the idea it is criticizing, or not. “All ideas are wrong” (for example) doesn’t engage with any of the explanations that the ideas it rejects give, it doesn’t point out flaws in them, it doesn’t help us learn. Criticisms which don’t help us learn better are no good—the whole purpose and meaning of criticism, as we conceive it, is you explain a flaw so we can learn better.
One issue this brings up is that communication is never 100% precise. There is always ambiguity. If a person wants to, he can interpret everything you say in the worst possible way. If he does so, he will sabotage your discussion. But if he follows Popper’s (not unique or original) advice to try to interpret ideas he hears as the best version they could mean—to try to figure out good ideas—then the conversation can work better.
If you try hard enough you can refuse to think at all.
Popperian epistemology helps people learn who want to. It doesn’t provide a set of rules that, if you follow them exactly while trying your best not to make progress, then you will learn anyway. We only learn much when we seriously try to, with good intentions.
You can always create trivial regresses, e.g. by asking “why?” infinitely many times. But that’s different than the following regress:
If you assert “theories should be justified, or they are crap”
and you assert “theories are justified in one way: when they are supported by a theory which is itself justified”
Then you have a serious problem to deal with which is not the same type as asking “why?” forever.
Things which reject entire categories is not a precise way to state what theories should be rejected. You are correct that the version I wrote can be improved to be clearer and more precise. One of the issues is whether a criticism engages with the substance of the idea it is criticizing, or not. “All ideas are wrong” (for example) doesn’t engage with any of the explanations that the ideas it rejects give, it doesn’t point out flaws in them, it doesn’t help us learn. Criticisms which don’t help us learn better are no good—the whole purpose and meaning of criticism, as we conceive it, is you explain a flaw so we can learn better.
One issue this brings up is that communication is never 100% precise. There is always ambiguity. If a person wants to, he can interpret everything you say in the worst possible way. If he does so, he will sabotage your discussion. But if he follows Popper’s (not unique or original) advice to try to interpret ideas he hears as the best version they could mean—to try to figure out good ideas—then the conversation can work better.