Goal: React to post and write about it.
Critical Fallibilism (CF) is a philosophy of reason .
Based on the definition in [Introduction to Reason], I take this to mean that CF is a philosophy focused on error correction. That means being open-minded to new ideas and to finding ways in which you could be wrong.
Epistemology offers methods to help guide you. It doesn’t directly tell you all the answers like whether to buy an iPhone upgrade or the right interpretation of quantum physics.
Epistemology isn’t morality. Epistemology helps you figure out how to achieve goals but goal selection is more of a morality problem.
Epistemology is about teaching you to fish instead of handing you a fish, but it deals with ideas, which are more important than fish.
Epistemology has a lot of meta-ideas, or ideas the talk about what to do with other ideas. It’s more general than specific, in application.
Everyone already has an epistemology, whether they know it or not.
Like Ayn Rand discussed in Philosophy: Who Needs It, everyone has to anwer the questions: What do I know?, How do I know it?, and What should I do?.
Second-handed epistemology relies on other people knowing things so that you can rely on them instead of yourself. Even if other people are knowledgeable, that doesn’t work well because you will make mistakes in trying to figure out what other people are telling you.
Trying to rely on your emotions or intuitions as a source of knowledge doesn’t work either because they can be mistaken.
If you consciously learn about epistemology, then you can discuss, analyze and improve your methods of thinking.
An adult’s epistemology is mostly subconscious and automatized. Since almost no one learned effective thinking methods as kids, almost all adults need to systematically study how to discern what’s correct and what’s an error. This is similar to the way in which people have some subconscious method of thinking about grammar, which usually needs to be analyzed and improved through conscious practice.
Reason is about being good at finding and correcting mistakes.
There are examples of methods of finding mistakes in ET’s videos on Evidence and Criticism.
- Reality and objective truth exist, and we can know about them.
I think Popper said something about how the very idea of error implies that there is some objective standard that you are comparing your theories against.
- Humans are unavoidably fallible – capable of making mistakes. We can never guarantee the truth of any of our ideas. And mistakes are common.
Seeking infallibility leads to either circularity (including self-supporting axioms) or infinite regress.
- We select what to observe, and interpret it, according to ideas we already have. We don’t directly learn from observations; we make guesses first and then use targeted observations to help test those guesses.
All of our observations are filtered through what we already know. We can observe something that we have no conception of. We have to notice differences between our expectations, based on our theories, and observations. So, our observations often just tell us that something is off but we don’t know what it is yet, and we may not know what is really off until we get a better theory.
- Applying CR to parenting and education more than Popper did.
I think this is one of the areas that really emphasized and highlighted win/win solutions. Seeking common preferences is an important moral idea that is related to parenting, liberalism, and treating yourself well (without coercion).
- Developing ideas about bounded vs. unbounded progress, infinity, universality and the jump to universality.
No matter how much you know you’re still at the beginning of infinity, meaning you are still ignorant of infinitely many things. I think you can be infinitely ignorant but not be making infinitely many errors because you don’t have to act on ideas that you don’t understand.
Jumps to universality explain why some ideas have tremendous reach. An idea that was intended to solve a narrow specific problem can turn out to solve tons of other problems including problems that no one had previously thought about. The more background goals and constraints that a potential solution has to satisfy, the more you are pushed toward seeking general solutions over rules of thumb.
- Yes or No Philosophy explains that ideas should be judged in a binary way: non-refuted or refuted. We can always act on non-refuted ideas, despite having limited resources such as limited time.
Ideas have to explain themesleves. The onus is on the idea to show what problem it solves and how it solves it. Something that doesn’t make sense for any reason if refuted.
- Paths Forward explains how to organize intellectual work to facilitate error correction.
Non-experts can judge experts by the state of debate. If an argument has unanswered criticisms, then why should someone think that the argument is wrong.
- Criticism of overreaching (don’t let your error rate exceed your error correction abilities) and the inefficiency of doing things when they’re hard (high resource cost and failure risk) instead of learning more first.
Even if you want to achieve big goals, you should start small and power up. It’s painful to try and fail repeatedly. A good life is a series of lots of small successes that compound into much greater successes. Experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t is different than trying and failing. The goal in experimentation is to find out what works and what doesn’t so a decisive outcome either way is a success.