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Comment by scoofy | Hacker News Reader

No, this is an incorrect assessment. You have framed it as post hoc, but the point is that the philosophy is the development of ideas like, say, atomic theory in chemistry, or germ theory in medicine. Theories that define the framework for study.

New sciences happen very infrequently, but they happen, and when they do, they are typically created in philosophy departments. Computer science is the most recent, which came in large part from philosophy departments. Before that was psychology.

Alchemy is exactly a framework-free type of empiricism. The point of philosophy, and philosophy that happens in other sciences, is that we live inside of a model, and we interact with that model, and change the model while we are doing empirical research using the rules of the model. This is a type of reflexive framework development, where metaphysical ideas become obvious physics as people propose changes to the standard model we use.

This dance between induction and deduction is exactly the field of philosophy.

View on HN

Incorrect. Philosophers write about, "organize" and "codify" what people are doing in the trenches from trial and error. To say that the philosophers created the science is like saying that by dressing a man in a suit they have created life.

I don't understand what you mean.

Philosophers of science have given us some axiomatic statements about the nature of deduction and the limits of inquiry, but research is a trade far more nuanced than a philosophical framework, with cultural transmission of domain specific problem solving strategies and learned intuitive guides. Those things are inherently a-philosophical, and also probably the most important of all.

I still don't understand your point. If you have some disagreement with certain philosophy of science writers, I can certainly understand, but my point is that philosophy is exactly the interplay of the deductive frameworks and the induction "in the trenches" as you say. The process of philosophy is the interplay between the to, as neither aspect of that dichotomy can be demonstrated it's own.

Empiricism cannot be justified without a reason-based framework, and that deductive framework is by definition arbitrary, and needs to map to empirical findings.

> Empiricism cannot be justified without a reason-based framework

Yes, it can. Empiricism can be justified empirically: it just works better than anything else humans have yet come up with.

The Black Swan problem (the problem of induction) prevents empiricism (induction) from being justified on its own. You end up with solipsism (turkey problem, grue problem, etc.)

Science does not rely on induction. Yes, I know you can find many sources that say otherwise, but they are wrong. Read this:

https://www.amazon.com/Fabric-Reality-Parallel-Universes-Imp...

especially chapter 7.

This is the basis of all superstition. Our crops were doing poorly, but then I burned a chicken and now they're doing well. Let's keep burning chickens.

You have to have an explanation of what counts as a valid empirical relation. And that depends on a whole lot of things worked out by philosophers and scientists.

Including, for example, that you can safely ignore correlations that can't have a basis in physical laws. Or that you can write certain symbols on a blackboard and compute the probability that your correlation is worth spending more time on.

I think we have different definitions of empiricism. Empiricism is the belief that sensory experience is necessary for knowledge, not that it is sufficient. It stands in contrast with the belief that knowledge can be justified by pure logic without reference to any sensory experience.

Mathematical knowledge can be justified by pure logic without reference to any sensory experience. Is that not knowledge? (This is an old argument.)

> Mathematical knowledge can be justified by pure logic without reference to any sensory experience.

No, I don't think it can. I challenge you to give me an example of mathematical knowledge that you can justify without reference to any sensory experience, keeping in mind that reading and hearing people talk are both sensory experiences.

It doesn't even have to be math. I'll bet you can't even define the distinction between "true" and "false" without reference to sensory experience.

Your claim was that empiricism justifies itself, I was explaining why that's not the case.

Your definition is overly broad IMO. Empiricism is usually taken to be the belief that the sole source and justification of knowledge is ultimately sensory data. See e.g. Wikipedia or Britannica.

It stands in contrast with rationalism sure. But more importantly in the context of your comment and the parent, empiricism also stands in contrast to the only sane POV (IMO), which is that knowledge is combination of empirical and rational sources, as pointed out for example by Kant.

> See e.g. Wikipedia

I did:

"empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence."

Note the phrase "or primarily".

> knowledge is combination of empirical and rational sources

The "or primarily" hedge is all I need to refute you (or at least to show that we are not actually in disagreement). However, rationality can itself be justified by empiricism if the Church-Turing thesis is correct, which I believe it is.

I suspect that you're using empiricism somewhat more broadly than philosophers do, and that you may include things like science as a whole. Science is more traditionally IMO considered to be a recursive process with rational (i.e. theory) and empirical (i.e. sense data) steps. In science, sense data provides a constraint on theory and theory (together with psychology) provide a constraint on the raw sense data (in the same way, for example, an AI provides structure to the raw input vectors).

If that's something along the lines of what you believe, then sure I'd say we're on the same page and we're not actually in disagreement.

But I wouldn't describe that belief system as saying empricism is self-justifying. Empiricism in practice goes off the rails pretty quickly with things like subjective idealism and the belief that there are no external entities, only sense data etc.

The thing we have now, where theory and experience mutually constrain each other seems obviously correct to me both in the academic sense (e.g. I think that Kant was right that the mind provides structure to raw sensory data). I also think it's true in the broader sense (e.g. that the applied sciences tend to move more slowly on their own and advance much more rapidly when combined with theory).

> Science is more traditionally IMO considered to be a recursive process with rational (i.e. theory) and empirical (i.e. sense data) steps.

That's true, but like so many traditions, it's wrong. Science can be justified entirely in terms of empiricism.

To be clear, it is not at all obvious that this is possible (it relies on the Church-Turing thesis), and so people can be forgiven for making this mistake. But it's still a mistake, and it's grounded in ignorance.

> Empiricism in practice goes off the rails pretty quickly with things like subjective idealism and the belief that there are no external entities, only sense data etc.

Unless your sensory experiences are radically different from mine, then you have to concede that those experiences behave, to a very close approximation, as if external entities exist, and a good explanation for that is that external entities do in fact exist.

Ironically, that explanation turns out to be wrong, but to see that you need to dive into quantum mechanics. And the justification for quantum mechanics grounds out in the sensory experience of perceiving the results of experiments. There is no escape from empiricism in the world we live in.

Respectfully I think we just disagree.

I do think we must have pretty different sensory experiences then, because my awareness of sensory data is entirely of processed data and nothing at all like the raw output of my retina (which I personally don't have accesss to although we can access it in animals if we cut their heads open). My ears have a high pitched ring constantly, and although it's indistinguishable from a sensory perspective from hearing a high pitched noise out in the world, my brain has somehow never attributed it to an outside object. Similarly with occular migraines.

I think a reasonable test would be whether you could build a useful embedded device out of only a sensor and no logic to interpret the output of that sensor.

The thing that lets us even talk meaningfully about computable functions is that they have a logical description. We wouldn't be able to say anything meaningful about the entire class of such functions if we were restricted to those we have experience of. It's not even clear what it would mean to universally quantify over a class of logical structures in a purely empirical world. We don't even need to get as fancy as computable functions. We couldn't even meaningfully talk about the class of natural numbers.

And the thing that lets us translate little dots on some quantum mechanical detector is that we have a mathematical theory that predicts that dots will look one way if such and such is the case. And they will look another way if such and such is the case. If sense data are all you need, then you have to give an account of why a trained experimental physicist can see different things in those dots than a toddler does.

> we just disagree.

Yes. Obviously.

> my awareness of sensory data is entirely of processed data and nothing at all like the raw output of my retina

Yes, obviously.

> I think a reasonable test would be whether you could build a useful embedded device out of only a sensor and no logic to interpret the output of that sensor.

A more useful test would be if you could build a useful embedded device with no sensors.

> The thing that lets us even talk meaningfully about computable functions is that they have a logical description.

But that logical description is a description of a physical process. The whole notion of computability is inherently physical. Even the lambda calculus is a description of a process of symbol-manipulation, and symbols are physical things.

> If sense data are all you need

That's a straw man. Empiricism does not claim that sense data is all you need. It is the claim that sense data are the primary source of knowledge. All knowledge -- even mathematical knowledge -- starts with sense data, is ultimately grounded in sense data, but is obviously not just raw sense data.

Nobody is disputing that sense data are necessary. The standard rationalist position is, to quote Leibniz since it's easily accessible on Wikipedia

> The senses, although they are necessary for all our actual knowledge, are not sufficient to give us the whole of it, since the senses never give anything but instances, that is to say particular or individual truths. Now all the instances which confirm a general truth, however numerous they may be, are not sufficient to establish the universal necessity of this same truth, for it does not follow that what happened before will happen in the same way again.

So sense data are necessary but not sufficient, especially for logic. If you believe that empiricism is self-justifying then it does seem like you have to start with the manifold of sense data and somehow build up logic from it. Otherwise you're going to end up #include-ing logic somewhere that may not be obvious, and you've landed to the position you were originally arguing against that you need a reason-based framework to justify empiricism.

A lot of smart people have tried to work out a version of empiricism that attempts to build of logic from sense data. For example, Russell's work and early Wittgenstein. But it always ends up getting pretty crazy.

The easiest way, IMO, to see why it won't work to build up human knowledge from sense data is to realize that the human knowledge system is a distributed system. Empiricists are working with the wrong unit of analysis. The words we have for thought are things like "logic" from logos or "word" and "rational" from ratio or "account" or "reckoning". They're both words that are fundamentally about multiple parties (in CS we can think of them as nodes) doing computation together. Some of the oldest ideas we have about reasoning are dialogs, and that basic idea persists to this day with things like game theoretic semantics. There seems to be something fundamentally "distributed systems" about thought and knowledge.

The individual nodes and their sensors aren't the whole story or even the bulk of the story. That's even more true when you consider that how we interpret sense data depends on billions of years of evolution. Yes we operate on sense data, but we do so using a logical structure that heavily constrains what we see, hear, taste and so forth.

Sense data plays a role, as Leibniz says, just as network cards play an important role in the Google data center. But I don't think anyone would really argue that the value of any large knowledge base is ultimately grounded in network packets.

> So sense data are necessary but not sufficient, especially for logic.

But they are sufficient.

> it does not follow that what happened before will happen in the same way again.

Yes, that's true. It does not follow that sense data are insufficient. All that follows is that induction is not a valid mode of reasoning (which is true -- it isn't).

> The easiest way, IMO, to see why it won't work to build up human knowledge from sense data is to realize that the human knowledge system is a distributed system.

Nonsense. Distributed systems can do logic. Being distributed is completely irrelevant.

If you try burning a chicken repeatedly when crops are doing poorly, and it works every time, that hypothesis is supported by the evidence. There's obviously no chain of direct causality, but that is immaterial.

This reminds me of scientists who completely shit on astrology for lacking any predictive power. At the very least it has some predictive power because people believe in it and subtly conform to its predictions. Beyond that, there are obviously cycles in the universe and we know biological cycles synchronize with natural ones (melatonin is any easy example, but animals synchronize to year level cycles as well). Are the stars causing the correlations, and are all the correlations astrology talks about present? Clearly not, but there is a mountain of poorly controlled empirical observations that hint to more being there than we've laid out with regard to human character that science is content to shit on because it can't do anything else without looking bad.

> Empiricism can be justified empirically

It's so obvious you haven't engaged with the subject matter.

How so?

I would assume that GP is referring to the problem of induction. Basically, your reasoning seems to be circular.

Good grief, the problem of induction was solved by Karl Popper decades ago. Do people here really not know that?

But Popper wasn't saying that empiricism could be justified empirically, was he?

In his own words, in the section on the problem of induction in The Logic of Scientific Discovery:

"My own view is that the various diﬃculties of inductive logic here sketched are insurmountable. So also, I fear, are those inherent in the doctrine, so widely current today, that inductive inference, although not ‘strictly valid’, can attain some degree of ‘reliability’ or of ‘probability’."

He then goes on to provide the (now contentious) falsification-based view of science after conceding that inductivism can't work.

> But Popper wasn't saying that empiricism could be justified empirically, was he?

No, I am saying that. Popper may have said it too, I don't know. I'm citing Popper to support my claim that science doesn't involve induction.

Why is it not circular reasoning to justify empirical reasoning via empirical reasoning?

(The formal problem of induction argument with its charge of circularity is best and most simply put here https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#Reco)

Because the only reason you have to believe anything at all is that you perceive things. And the things that you perceive probably lead you to believe things like that you are a human being, that you exist in a particular subset of three-dimensional space, that there are other humans that exist in other subsets of that same three-dimensional space, that these other humans move around and do things that can reasonably be described as "saying things" and "writing things", and that the things that these other humans say and write correspond to circumstances in this three-dimensional space that you occupy so that it makes sense, at least in some circumstances, to label these sayings and writings with labels like "true" and "false" to indicate whether the way they correspond with circumstances is a positive or negative correlation, and if you get these labels right it can help you survive and flourish. Likewise, if you get them wrong (and that includes denying what I have just told you) it will greatly diminish your prospects of survival, and evolution will take care of the rest. In short, it isn't circular because if you try to pick a fight with reality, reality will win.

I see where you're coming from, but none of this really means that justifying inductive reasoning through inductive reasoning isn't circular.

Hume himself thinks that inductive reasoning is grounded in "custom or habit", and thinks it's rational to proceed this way---a solution you'd probably agree with.

> inductive reasoning

Who said anything about inductive reasoning? I'm defending empiricism, not induction. Induction is just flat-out wrong.

I suppose the confusion still remains about how empiricism can be self-justifying. You've laid out a case for why it's empirical reasoning is pragmatic, fine, but that doesn't mean that empirical reasoning is grounded in empirical reasoning, even if empirical reasoning is in fact rational. Whether you go with a Humean-style solution or a Popperian solution, it's just still not the case that justifying empirical reasoning through empirical reasoning is not circular.

What about the argument presented in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40100070 did you find inadequate?

The reason it's not circular is that it grounds out in actual reality.

I suppose you could deny the existence of actual reality. If you want to do that, you are beyond my ability to help.

I'm disputing something very specific. I'm not disputing that empirical reasoning is rational. What I'm disputing is that empirical reasoning is justified by empirical reasoning. This not being circular is not logically related to actual reality. Like, I'm just saying that this doesn't make sense:

1: If you try to pick a fight with reality, reality will win. (Empirical reasoning is evolutionary useful, etc.) 2: Thus, empirical reasoning is justified by empirical reasoning.

2 doesn't follow from 1. I accept 1, and I accept the rationality of empirical reasoning, but I don't accept 2.

> empirical reasoning

You've actually moved the goal posts here. The original claim was: empiricism can be justified empirically. But "empiricism" and "empirical reasoning" are not synonyms.

(You also threw in induction at some point, which is just a red herring.)

So let me try this again: to quote Wikipedia, empiricism is an epistemological view which holds that true knowledge or justification comes only or primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence. This can be justified empirically (I claim) by observing (empirically!) that people who do not base their actions on sensory experience will do stupid things like walk into walls or fall off cliffs.

If you want to dispute this, tell me how you would define the words "true" and "false" without making any reference to sensory experience.

Oh, I see, since we were talking about science, I figured you really just meant induction, I didn't think you meant empiricism, the philosophical school of thought (in contrast to rationalism), that's my bad.

But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori. Like, how is seeing that people who don't base their actions on sensory experience evidence for true knowledge or justification primarily coming from sensory experience and empirical evidence? Seeing people who don't base their actions on all guns being loaded doing stupid things like injuring themselves or others unintentionally doesn't make it true that all guns are loaded. I think what you really want to say is that empiricism is a very intuitive idea, and that it's telling that people who deny the reliability of sensory experience do silly things. (Not that rationalists were denying the validity of sensory experience anyway, it's not like Descartes or Spinoza were denying sense-data).

> I didn't think you meant empiricism

Well, that's pretty stupid, since I was actually using that exact word. You are quite literally saying, "Oh, when you said X, I didn't think you actually meant X, I thought you meant Y." (And in this case your Y is something that I absolutely do not believe.)

> But it seems that empiricism is a view that you have to hold a priori as opposed to a posteriori.

Why? Why cannot I not simply observe that when I base my decisions on plausible explanations of things that I observe I get better outcomes than when I base my decisions on some other criterion?

I mean, the first mention of empiricism was about classifying alchemy as a type of empiricism, which leads one to believe the discussion can't be about empiricism in the technical philosophical sense because being an empiricist or not doesn't have anything to do with alchemy technically speaking, and as the discussion went on there was a claim made that empiricism is justified empirically which is something that none of the three paradigmatic empiricist philosophers (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) said, so the context of the discussion didn't seem to suit the technical meaning of the word. The spirit of the discussion seemed to be more about empirical reasoning and its empirical justification, so I went along with that.

>Why? Why cannot I not simply observe that when I base my decisions on plausible explanations of things that I observe I get better outcomes than when I base my decisions on some other criterion?

You can observe that, I'm just saying that this doesn't prove anything about sensory experience being the primary means for knowledge. Like, Descartes, the paradigmatic rationalist, is happy to do this. But he still thinks that logical truths arrived at through experience-independent reasoning are the primary source of knowledge.

> the first mention of empiricism was about classifying alchemy as a type of empiricism

Yeah, but that wasn't me, that was scoofy.

> this doesn't prove anything about sensory experience being the primary means for knowledge.

It does until someone comes up with a better idea.

> he still thinks that logical truths arrived at through experience-independent reasoning are the primary source of knowledge.

Well, yeah, but he's just obviously wrong.

1. I observe that people do not base their actions on sensory experience do stupid things.

2. Therefore, true knowledge or justification comes only from sensory experience and empirical evidence.

All that I'm saying is that (2) does not logically follow from (1), no more than "Socrates is mortal" follows from "All men are mortal". There's something missing here, an additional premise, (like "Socrates is a man" in the Socrates example).

> true knowledge or justification comes only from sensory experience and empirical evidence

That's a straw man. It's not "only", it's "primarily". Sensory experience is necessary, not sufficient.

Fine, fine, replace only with primarily, and reread the comment, that's not a crucial point.

OK, but if you make that change then 2 does follow from 1.

OK, let's be completely, utterly, crystal clear about this.

1. I observe that people who do not base their actions on sensory experience do stupid things.

2. Therefore, true knowledge or justification comes primarily from sensory experience and empirical evidence.

You're telling me that 2 is a logical implication of 1? You're perfectly happy with the way I've framed this---there are no hidden premises or anything like that? 2 is a direct, logical implication of 1?

I am not "perfectly happy" with it, no. For starters, I don't think there actually are people who do not base their actions on sensory experiences. Evolution mitigates against that pretty strongly.

I would say that if someone doesn't base their actions on sensory experience (a very big if) then they will be totally unable to navigate reality. They will almost certainly injure themselves, possibly others, and likely even kill themselves and maybe take others down with them. It's so obvious and the consequences so severe that it would be unethical to actually conduct this experiment.

Also, 2 is not a logical implication of 1. One can never rule out the possibility that, say, all human behavior is controlled by evil demons. What I would say is that my version of 1 is very compelling evidence for 2, and one of the things that makes it compelling is that it is so obviously true that a sane person would never even contemplate it as anything other than a thought experiment.

BTW, would you have any interest in being a guest on a podcast?

>Also, 2 is not a logical implication of 1. One can never rule out the possibility that, say, all human behavior is controlled by evil demons. What I would say is that my version of 1 is very compelling evidence for 2, and one of the things that makes it compelling is that it is so obviously true that a sane person would never even contemplate it as anything other than a thought experiment.

Oh good, ok - you see my confusion, I thought you were saying that it was a logical implication. I would still say that 2 isn't really grounded in 1 so much as it is self-evidently true. Like, if we're being controlled by evil demons, 1 isn't even relevant---the question is fundamentally whether sense-experience gives us true knowledge bar extenuating circumstances or not; I think the answer is yes, but not because we see that this belief is a useful belief, it's because 2 itself is intuitively true. I don't believe that my perception of me sitting on a chair is good grounds for the proposition that I really am sitting on a chair not because of a thought experiment about lacking that belief leading to injury---I believe it because it seems true itself. And I think this is the right solution in general for related issues, whether it's inductive inferences (I think they're rational), belief in causality, belief in the validity of sense-data, or any other typical issue for empiricism.

The "X is key for survival, so X must be true" way of thinking has never been appealing to me---this seems to miss the point of what it means for something to be true. Like, I don't believe in 1+1=2 because it's useful for economics, physics, math, or whatever---I think it's true independently of its utility. Similarly for other truths.

>podcast

I'd prefer to not publicize my real name and face, so no, unfortunately (unless you'd be OK with that; I'd be happy to chat if so).

> I don't believe in 1+1=2 because it's useful for economics, physics, math, or whatever---I think it's true independently of its utility.

I actually doubt that. What do you think 11+27 is? If your answer was "38" then the followup question is: suppose it is 11:00. What time will it be 27 hours from now?

The "correct" answer to "what is 11+27" depends on circumstances in the real world (and so does 1+1). There are no Platonic truths, only preferred models.

> X is key for survival, so X must be true

It's not that. It's "X is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality." That's what the word "true" means.

It just so happens that the actual state of affairs in objective reality has an impact on survival, so having a faithful reflection of it in your brain is handy. That's the reason "truth" is a thing.

> I'd prefer to not publicize my real name and face

Well, a podcast is voice only, so that's not really a show-stopper.

>There are no Platonic truths, only preferred models.

Yeah, I disagree, I think there's something mathematical truths reflect that are independent of the physical world. When we decide whether certain mathematical claims are true or not, say, Fermat's last theorem---we prove them mathematically, we don't want to appeal to their utility or lack thereof, right? My reasoning for not wanting to appeal to utility for the validity of sense-data is analogous.

>That's what the word "true" means.

I agree.

>It just so happens that the actual state of affairs in objective reality has an impact on survival, so having a faithful reflection of it in your brain is handy.

I agree.

>That's the reason "truth" is a thing.

Well, truth is a thing regardless of whether or not we evolved to be able to hold such a concept in our minds, no?

>podcast

Sure. Contact me at knightoffaith123@proton.me

> When we decide whether certain mathematical claims are true or not, say, Fermat's last theorem---we prove them mathematically, we don't want to appeal to their utility or lack thereof, right?

Well, sort of. We don't care about the utility of Fermat's last theorem per se, but the only reason we care about numbers, which is what Fermat's last theorem is about, is because numbers have utility. It turns out that, having invented numbers for their utility, they also make fun mental playthings. But they were invented to keep track of how many sheep you had.

> Well, truth is a thing regardless of whether or not we evolved to be able to hold such a concept in our minds, no?

No. Truth is a property of propositions, so it only makes sense to talk about truth in the context of something that can harbor a proposition. If such a thing does not exist then neither do propositions and hence neither does truth. It's kind of like talking about "the mass of an idea". Mass is a property of matter, so it doesn't make sense to apply it to something that isn't made of matter.

The thing that encodes propositions doesn't have to be a human brain, of course. It could be an alien brain, or a computer, perhaps even a thermostat (that one is debatable). But it has to be something.

>Well, sort of

All that's fine---but I think you would agree that Fermat's last theorem isn't true by virtue of its utility for counting sheep or anything like that. Similarly, I don't think that the fact the physical world exists in the manner suggested by sense-data is true by virtue of its utility for preventing us from dying.

>The thing that encodes propositions doesn't have to be a human brain, of course. It could be an alien brain, or a computer, perhaps even a thermostat (that one is debatable). But it has to be something.

Are you saying that if there were no humans (or anything capable of encoding propositions) to conceive of it, the proposition "the earth is round" wouldn't be true---in other words, it would not be true that the earth is round? That seems to defy common sense.

> I think you would agree that Fermat's last theorem isn't true by virtue of its utility for counting sheep or anything like that. Similarly, I don't think that the fact the physical world exists in the manner suggested by sense-data is true by virtue of its utility for preventing us from dying.

I actually would not agree with either of those.

> Are you saying that if there were no humans (or anything capable of encoding propositions) to conceive of it, the proposition "the earth is round" wouldn't be true---in other words, it would not be true that the earth is round? That seems to defy common sense.

Yes, I get that. This is not an easy concept to wrap your brain around, and I totally understand if you think it sounds like I'm absolutely crazy. But nonetheless, it is the case that if there were no humans (or anything capable of encoding propositions) to conceive of it, the proposition "the earth is round" would not be true. The reason is that if there were nothing capable of encoding that proposition, that proposition could not exist. A non-existent thing cannot have any properties, and so a non-existent proposition cannot be true.

Two important things to note: first, the proposition "the earth is round" would not be true in a world where there is nothing capable of encoding propositions, but neither would it be false. It would simply be non-existent. And second, despite the fact that the proposition "the earth is round" would be neither true nor false, the earth would still be round. But we can only make that observation because we live in a world where there are things capable of encoding propositions. It's really hard to imagine a world where that is not the case because we would not exist in such a world.

Here is a thought experiment that might help: consider some proposition P that has never been conceived of and will never be conceived of by anything capable of encoding propositions. Such propositions must exist because there are an infinite number of propositions but we live in a finite universe, and so only a finite number of propositions can ever be encoded. In fact, there must be an infinite number of such propositions. Are those propositions true or are they false?

This might help too:

https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/an-intuitive-counterexam...

It's not directly on point, but it describes a similar concept in math.

>It's "X is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality." That's what the word "true" means.

As you've said earlier. This sounds like a reasonable construal of the word true. But I don't see anything about propositions needing to be encoded in this definition. "The earth is round" is a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality. It was a faithful reflection of the actual state of affairs in objective reality even before anyone was around to conceptualize this as a proposition. You don't think so?

Did I point you to this already?

https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.h...

Did you read it? Do you accept it?

Propositions are ideas, i.e. they exist in a different ontological category than material objects like earth (note no quotation marks). The word "earth" (with quotes) is an idea, one that happens to refer to earth, i.e. the material object referred to by the word "earth", which happens to be round. The words "earth is round" (with quotes) is also an idea, one which refers to a particular property (roundness) of a particular material object (earth). That idea falls into a subset of the more general concept of ideas which we call "propositions" because they have a particular relationship to the states of material objects, i.e. "the earth is round" (with quotes) is true because the earth is round (no quotes).

Material objects are made of atoms; they cannot exist without the atoms that comprise them, but their existence is more than just the totality of the existence of their constituent atoms. All of the atoms that comprise the earth existed billions of years before the earth came into existence. Earth did not come into existence until the atoms that comprise it arranged themselves in a particular way.

Ideas are not made of atoms, they are made of information. Just like material objects, ideas do not come into existence until some information that encodes that idea arranges itself in a particular way, i.e. until they are thought of. A proposition that hasn't been thought of is like a poem that hasn't been written. Saying that an unthought-of proposition is true is like saying that an unwritten poem rhymes.

Consider the words "Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father." Do those words stand for a proposition? Is that proposition true? Was it true before 1977 (keeping in mind here that the Star Wars story ostensibly happened "a long time ago")? Would Rene Descartes be able to recognize it as a true proposition?

It's really hard to talk about ideas. With material object you can point at them, poke them, prod them, weight them, shine lights at them. You can't do any of those things with ideas. All you can do is refer to them using representations like "the earth is round" (with quotes) or "la terre est ronde" or "Die Erde ist rund" or "地球是圆的". It is the act of referring to them in a way that some being can recognize as referring to a proposition that causes the proposition to come into being, just as the act of composing a poem causes that poem to come into being. Unwritten poems do not rhyme, and they do not not-rhyme. They simply aren't. Likewise, unthought-of propositions are neither true nor false.

>Did you read it? Do you accept it?

Accept what specifically?

Here's what I understand you to be saying, and you're free to reframe this.

1. Propositions are ideas. 2. Ideas can only exist if they are conceived. 3. "The earth is round" is a proposition. 4. Therefore, "the earth is round" can only exist if it is conceived. 5. Truth and falsity are properties of propositions. 6. If something does not exist, it cannot have any properties. 6. If it is not conceived, "the earth is round" cannot exist. 7. "The earth is round" cannot have any properties. 8. Truth and falsity are not properties of "the earth is round".

Sounds reasonable. But how do we square this with:

1. "The earth is round" reflects a state of affairs about objective reality. 2. If something reflects a state of affairs about objective reality, it is true. 3. "The earth is round" is true.

There's nothing here about "the earth is round" needing to be conceived by someone.

One issue I would raise is the first argument's 1 and 2. Propositions don't just exist insofar as they are conceived. Representations of propositions, sure, but not propositions themselves.

> Sounds reasonable.

Cool.

> There's nothing here about "the earth is round" needing to be conceived by someone.

Yes, there is. You can't talk about a proposition without conceiving of it. The instant you wrote “"The earth is round"” (note the nested quotes) you conceived of the proposition "the earth is round" and brought it into being. This is impossible to avoid. So this:

> There's nothing here about "the earth is round" needing to be conceived by someone.

is false.

> Propositions don't just exist insofar as they are conceived. Representations of propositions, sure, but not propositions themselves.

I already gave you the answer to this in the parent comment but you ignored it.

"Ideas are not made of atoms, they are made of information. Just like material objects, ideas do not come into existence until some information that encodes that idea arranges itself in a particular way, i.e. until they are thought of."

etc.

So that is (still) my answer: you are simply mistaken when you say that "Propositions don't just exist insofar as they are conceived."

(You're in good company. Plato got this wrong too, and he was no dummy. But he didn't have Alan Turing's shoulders to stand on.)

BTW, note that the converse is not true. You can conceive of an idea without rendering it into a representation. Indeed, you can conceive of an idea without even being able to render it into a representation. (This is actually quite common!) But what you can't do is produce a rendering of an idea into a representation without conceiving of the idea being represented. (BTW, that is not quite true. There is a tiny loophole, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for you to figure out what it is.)

>So this is false

In the second argument, could you tell me which of (1) and (2) are incorrect, and why?

If it's the quotes that are problematic, I'm fine to drop those.

The earth is round, regardless of whether people have this idea in their heads or not. You deny this?

>I already gave you the answer to this in the parent comment but you ignored it.

But I didn't disagree that ideas are not made of atoms. What I disagreed with is that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived.

>(You're in good company. Plato got this wrong too, and he was no dummy. But he didn't have Alan Turing's shoulders to stand on.)

What did Turing do that proved that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived? Or are you just talking about scientific progress in general?

> The earth is round, regardless of whether people have this idea in their heads or not. You deny this?

No. What I deny is that "the earth is round" and "the proposition 'the earth is round' is true" are identical propositions. The first is a proposition that makes a claim about the roundness of the earth, and the second is a proposition that makes a claim about the truth of a proposition. Those aren't the same thing.

The earth is round whether or not anyone is around to contemplate it (the earth). But "the earth is round" is not true unless someone is around to contemplate it (the proposition).

> What did Turing do that proved that propositions only exist insofar as they are conceived?

That's a long story, and I have to run to a meeting right now. If you really want to know, remind me later. I may need to write a blog post about it.

But forget about propositions for the moment. Do you think that unwritten poems exist?

So, I think if saying "the earth is round" is true and saying the earth is round mean different things, then we haven't construed the former properly, the former should be construed as expressing the same thing as the latter. If it's just a linguistic disagreement, then I think we can set that aside, I'm not very interested in that. The original point was that we can intuit certain things as being true, e.g. that sense-data reflects something about reality, and there's no need to appeal to how useful believing this is or isn't. Like, conceivably, nuclear wars could lead to the annihilation of humanity, but I don't see why that should have any bearing on whether atomic bombs exist or not.

> the former should be construed as expressing the same thing as the latter. If it's just a linguistic disagreement, then I think we can set that aside

No, this is not just a linguistic disagreement. This is the crux of the matter. By saying that "the earth is round" and "the proposition 'the earth is round' is true" mean the same thing you are conflating two different ontological categories. When you do that, your reasoning is no longer sound.

Consider this:

P1: The U.S.S. Enterprise can travel faster than light.

Is P1 true? If yes, then how can that be when we know from relativity theory that nothing can travel faster than light? And if no, then what about these:

P2: The U.S.S. Enterprise is powered by a matter-anti-matter reaction controlled by dilithium crystals.

P3: The U.S.S. Enterprise is powered by squirrels running on treadmills.

---

P.S. It occurred to me that there is a TL;DR answer to the question of what Turing did that was so important: he invented general-purpose software.

You’re confusing empiricism with evolutionary epistemology. Evolutionary epistemology isn’t exclusively empirical.

No, I'm not confusing them. At worst I'm using evolutionary epistemology to justify empiricism. And I'm only doing that because I'm presenting an informal argument. I can justify empiricism without resorting to evolution. But invoking evolution has more emotional appeal to entities that have evolved and so presumably don't have to be persuaded of the value of survival.

> Evolutionary epistemology isn’t exclusively empirical.

Neither is empiricism.

You can call someone's reasoning circular all you want but at the end of the day there's what you've accomplished, and the score is philospher 0 engineer 1.

True, it's basically indisputable that engineers are better at engineering than philosophers are. But that seems orthogonal to the issues raised in the problem of induction.

My thrust was more that people are out doing stuff in the world, and for the most part philosophers don't do anything other than say things about what people are already doing. Engineering was an empirical science long before it was a deductive and analytic one.

Philosophers make arguments for/against claims, I don't see why that doesn't count as doing something. I mean, maybe you're complaining that they're not building rockets or feeding the poor, but philosophers are far from the only ones who don't do these things.

Making arguments for/against claims can be a noble pursuit, and mathematicians have done it to great benefit for humanity. I suspect the sum total of the benefit from philosophers' claims is much lower.

Maybe so, but I don't see why every discipline needs to be evaluated purely on "benefit for humanity" in the sense of scientific or technological progress, if that's what you're implying. There's more to humanity than just scientific/technological progress.

I mean, people love musicians for making interesting "what if" statements to music, and I'm not shitting on that. The difference is that music makes people happy and makes the time go faster, while most philosophy makes people confused for no good reason, is boring and even when "understood" doesn't provide any tangible benefit to people's lives.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good "philosophy" out there, but it absolutely doesn't need to be its own academic discipline, it could just be a genre of nonfiction - "fun thought experiments taht will blow your mind"

>philosophy makes people confused for no good reason, is boring and even when "understood" doesn't provide any tangible benefit to people's lives.

I mean, maybe this is true for some people, but there are a lot of people who don't get confused and who find it interesting and enjoyable.

>Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of good "philosophy" out there, but it absolutely doesn't need to be its own academic discipline, it could just be a genre of nonfiction - "fun thought experiments taht will blow your mind"

Philosophers are particularly interested in reasoning about whether certain claims are true or false though, not just saying "what if". I mean, if you want the literature and philosophy departments to nominally merge together and for philosophers to continue doing what they're doing, that's fine I suppose, though there are institutional reasons why that's probably not going to happen.

Except that there are practically journals just for arguing about what one particular german guy who has been dead for 150 years meant when he said a thing. That is not a sign of clear writing.

I'm not sure how that contradicts what I've said or why this means we should abolish philosophy departments. And for what it's worth, philosophy today tends to be clearer (to us at least), e.g. Dennett's work.

I don’t think you understand what philosophy is.

I do. The sad leftovers after everyone else got to pick the good bits. Once a noble pursuit before things diverged into actual fields.

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