Critical Fallibilism (CF) is a philosophical system that focuses on dealing with ideas. It has concepts and methods related to thinking, learning, discussing, debating, making decisions and evaluating ideas. CF combines new concepts with prior knowledge. It was created by me, Elliot Temple.
I’m doing a close reading of this article.
This outline has a few additional comments by me, so it isn’t only trying to represent the article.
CF inspiration outline:
I haven’t started reading past the first heading.
This took 20 minutes.
I’m also adding additional comments in the outline without clear labels separating what tries to represent the article and what are my additional thoughts.
I’ve now read until the first sub-heading.
This took 2 hours. It was fun! I find this enjoyable.
Ideas, like genes, have different amounts of knowledge or adaptation.
no. suppose a goal is impossible. then all ideas are refuted for that goal. calling them non-refuted wouldn’t make sense because they won’t work.
whether an idea succeeds or fails at a goal is about that idea and that goal, not a comparison to alternatives.
a common case is when you have 2+ alternatives for how to achieve part of a plan.
like you want to eat at a restaurant. you can walk there or drive there. an error with walking isn’t decisive since you can still drive. an error with driving isn’t decisive since you can still walk. but both errors together is decisive because you need at least one transportation method to work.
Does more knowledge mean closer to truth?
Makes sense. Some (abstract) problems don’t have solutions.
So how do we choose goals to consider? We have to make choices about what we want. It’s up to us to decide what we value.
Goals are ideas we can criticize. However by what standard can we criticize goals by? You can critique it by saying it is hard or impossible to achieve. If we only consider goals that are plausible, then we ask: what goals would lead to good if they were achieved? This is perhaps more of a morality question. Rand’s idea was that there was an ultimate goal, life, that all other goals are subordinate of. Epistemology might be very relevant though because it seems similar to ultimate foundations and final truth.
“It’s up to us to decide what we value” seems to suggest relativist morality, but I think Elliot thinks there exists objectively good values. I think he means that we have to guess/conjecture at good values. Does objective values logically require an ultimate value? If there are epistemological issues with knowing the ultimate value, it might still exist like the final truth exists.
I think I could write more, but I might not have time to write more for a couple of days, so I’m posting this for now.
Something that I’ve been thinking about recently is the asymmetric nature of truth and falsity. False ideas can contradict other false ideas and true ideas, but true ideas can only contradict false ideas. True ideas wont contradict each other. I think this is a big part of why the critical method is truth seeking (correcting error = pursuing the truth.)
So, I think we can also criticise goals if they conflict with other goals we have. They can’t both be objectively right goals if they conflict, so there is a problem there to solve.
Perfect non-contradictory truth is a good abstract concept but it’s not what people generally work with. We use error correction to fix some contradictions we find, making our ideas less contradictory.
@LMD’s suggestion of following non-contradiction may be enough to reach a bunch of good objective goals, maybe all of them. But I’m also interested in whether there are ultimate goals, and whether there exists is a single ultimate goal.
Most goals are sub-goals, they are the means to an end. Sub-goals can form a long chain, one sub-goal is meant for another sub-goal which works toward another sub-goal. But can this go on for infinity? Does it not have to end at some final goal? Wouldn’t the whole chain of sub-goals be meaningless if it didn’t have a final goal? I think there has to be ultimate goals.
Perhaps this is wrong because I have wrong ideas about infinity. Perhaps an infinite chain of sub-goals could have meaning and be objectively good. I wouldn’t know how that would work though.
My intuition tells me that if ultimate values are needed for objective values then there should be a single ultimate value. But I can’t see by logic why there couldn’t be multiple ultimate values.
I checked her writing to check whether this was true, but otherwise what I have written was just things I thought of for myself. Although I’m certain that I originally got these ideas from Rand. I skimmed through The Objectivist Ethics from The Virtue of Selfishness and found the most relevant part:
An ultimate value is that final goal or end to which all lesser goals are the means—and it sets the standard by which all lesser goals are evaluated. An organism’s life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.
Without an ultimate goal or end, there can be no lesser goals or means: a series of means going off into an infinite progression toward a nonexistent end is a metaphysical and epistemological impossibility. It is only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, that makes the existence of values possible.
My current goal is to learn about epistemology, so I’ll prioritize continuing with the article over continuing on this tangent, even though I find this topic very interesting. I’ll answer responses to this tangent though.
I share your interest in this topic. Have you read Elliot’s Morality without Foundations article and the dialog[edit: link] it links to? It might interest you.
It talks about how not knowing what the true ultimate goals are doesn’t matter that much and that many different moral goals converge on the same intermediate goals. It’s interesting and for me it was counter-intuitive that the different ultimate goals don’t render a lot of the intermediate goals meaningless.
(I understand that you’re interested in whether or not there are true, objective ultimate goals, and that this is different.)
Yeah I can see that it’s not necessary to use the idea of perfect truth to understand why we shouldn’t have contradictory goals. Having contradictory goals is bad for the simple reason that you cant achieve both.
You can’t learn by just following non-contradiction. It doesn’t lead you to knowledge. You learn by evolution, which includes replication with variation (guessing, brainstorming). Non-contradiction is an important tool for the selection (criticism, error correction) part of evolution.
I think Popper is a broadly a better guide than Rand to these issues.
I didn’t realize I was talking about learning. I see that:
means a full process of knowledge creation. What I had in mind was that we might not need to know of an ultimate goal in order to find objective goals, the standard could be non-contradiction.
Non-contradiction is a common standard for all knowledge though (I’m not trying to say perfect non-contradiction is necessary in order to have knowledge, just that it’s something we try to move towards). Evaluating according to the standard of an ultimate goal would be unique to goals. So they aren’t really the same thing. So the question is more whether goals needs this special standard, or whether they’re like all other knowledge.
I think requiring to know the ultimate goal in order to know of any objective goals would be justificationism (I don’t understand justificationism very well though, so I’m uncertain). So epistemologically we don’t need ultimate goals, but I think they have to exist metaphysically (or maybe it’s better to say “by logic” instead of metaphysically. I think this has to do with the reality of abstractions which I need to learn more about later).
To the issue of whether there must exist ultimate goals or not?
Cool! We’ll discuss it in the future then (or now.)
Yes, some time ago. I have thought about it quite a lot since then. I’ll read it again and I think I’ll have issues that I’ll need to discuss then.
I think that’s not the link you meant.
oops fixed thanks!
It’s like all other knowledge: fallible and evolutionary. That’s always the answer for everything. To think maybe otherwise involves approaching the issue from some other perspective besides Popper’s.
I worried about my sentence being interpreted like this (your interpretation is objectively correct, I was uncertain when I wrote it.) I didn’t think that goals have a unique epistemological status. What I had in mind was something like computers being evaluated on the standard of how fast they can compute (among other things.) It would be special like how we don’t evaluate shoes by how fast they can compute. And I wanted to contrast that with how non-contradiction is a standard that applies to all knowledge. I think “whether they’re like all other knowledge” and maybe “special” were bad writing choices.
Since I had those doubts I don’t know why I chose to write it anyway. I may have had a conceptual confusion as well.
Took 45-50 minutes.
40 min.
I realized now that if there is a single end goal then that implies we should maximize it. That’s if it’s a quantity, if it’s a small digital thing then we either achieve it once and have nothing left to do, or it’s a thing we have to maintain forever.
What about multiple end goals? Then we should try to maximize all of them, except that doesn’t work. If we try to convert them into a single factor then that actually implies there’s a single end goal: to maximize that factor. A combination of one quantitative goal with many other qualitative goals could work. You would try to maintain the qualitative goals while increasing the quantitative goal as much as possible. Actually I don’t think the impossibility of maximizing multiple factors means there couldn’t be multiple quantitative end goals, it’s just that it would be harder for us to use as a guide as opposed to a single quantitative goal.
This pushes my intuition towards thinking there is only a single end goal. I don’t think reality would pose the impossible problem of maximizing multiple end goals.