Critical Discussion and Justificationism pre-ideas
Critical Discussion
Finding errors in ideas and correcting them is how evolution improves the ideas, rather than increasing the justification for the ideas. Thus a critical mindset and critical discussion is important for the growth of knowledge.
CR says that the ideas that best survive criticism are the ones we ought to believe in (would CR not talk about belief here?). Ideally after refuting a bunch of ideas we are left with only one idea that has survived all the criticism, and that’s the idea we should believe in (is this a CF original idea?). CR says that we can’t prove ideas correct by tests, but they can be corroborated by tests if they pass the tests and thus we can have greater confidence in the idea (would CR talk about confidence in ideas?).
We can also view some solo thinking as self-discussion. We might have two contradicting ideas in which we don’t know which to accept and which to reject. In such situations we ought to approach it much like a critical discussion with another person. We ought to not be biased for one side and we ought to look for errors in both sides.
Critical discussion is often viewed as adversarial where each tries their best not to lose and tries to defend their side as much as possible. But since criticism is the beginning of the growth of knowledge we ought to generally think of receiving criticism as a gift. If I’m wrong in a debate it is I that learned something, while my discussion partner merely had to be my teacher. In reality it is the person who was wrong who actually “won”, it is he gained the most. But if you were right from the start that doesn’t mean you wasted your time either. Critical discussion doesn’t have to end in agreement in order to be productive. By exposing your ideas to criticism you can improve them and/or improve your arguments for them.
Review
I focused on discussion while the article spoke a lot about criticism. I found it necessary to say a bit about criticism in the beginning to connect, but I intentionally limited it. I think it’s generally better to just write more and not worry about things being covered in other sections. The purpose here is partly to expose what I already know and believe and look for contradictions with the article and errors generally. So if I write more than the article then that doesn’t really matter. I still benefitted from writing it as well.
So confidence in ideas would be wrong according to CR, it’s about preferring ideas that better survived criticism.
The rest of what I said wasn’t relevant. I actually a bit puzzled why this stuff would come so early in the article, but it was all I could think of on discussion. I was also puzzled because I knew Popper didn’t say that much about specifics on how to do critical discussion.
My focus wasn’t the same so I don’t think I can say much about what I missed. Unlucky.
Justificationism
Justificationism is the idea that you can improve ideas by providing positive supporting arguments. It says that knowledge is justified true belief. By giving an idea supporting arguments our belief that the idea is true becomes more and more justified.
Evidence is usually highly regarded and preferred over arguments by justificationists. According to them when our ideas fit the evidence our justification for the ideas increases. Even if we accepted that evidence can justify ideas we could still see there’s an logical asymmetry here. You only need one decisive criticism to deem an idea false, whereas a single instance of evidence isn’t usually regarded by justificationists as fully confirming an idea.
However CR rejects that any supporting argument or evidence can actually provide any justification. CR says we can only use negative arguments to refute ideas and use the surviving ones.
If we claim “all ravens are black” then justificationism says that observing black ravens increases the justification for this statement. But we also know that if we observed a single nonblack raven then the statement would be false. No matter how many black ravens we have observed, the possibility of a nonblack raven still exists. We can never prove that a nonblack raven doesn’t exist.
The best justificationism could do then is to say that observing black ravens increases the probability that all ravens are black. An interesting consequence here would be that observations of non-ravens would also increase the probability. Since all observing a black raven does is to confirm that this material is not a nonblack raven. A black raven doesn’t actually say anything about nonblack ravens. One could argue that observations of black ravens provide more justification since ravens are a subset of all other material. You wouldn’t really know what the probability change was anyway since you have no way of knowing with certainty how many ravens exist in the universe (there could exist ravens on other planets!).
Actually I don’t know why CR says the probability doesn’t increase. If I assume there exist a finite number of ravens then I could use an easier example to illustrate the same point. Instead I say I draw a ball from a bag with X amount of balls and observe that it’s black, if we assume uniform probability for black vs nonblack on every other ball (X + 1 different configurations being equally likely) then we can calculate the probability for any X, and the probability would increase for each black ball we drew out. Does CR say the principle of indifference is wrong, can I not extrapolate from the balls in the bag to ravens in the universe?
I asked Claude AI: “let’s say I take out a ball from a bag of which know there are 100 balls and the ball is black. what is the probability that rest of the balls are also black”. I didn’t about the principle of indifference before this.
Review
I didn’t say anything about “true” or “belief”.
I talked more about justifying beliefs/ideas rather amount of goodness. I think they’re almost the same?
I think I don’t the variety in justificationist thinking. So I assumed they conceded some things that I thought were true like decisive criticism and that at least most them think in terms of probable and high credence rather absolute certain true knowledge. Which is ironic given I’ve been talking with @actually_thinking who believes in absolute certain true knowledge.
Critical Discussion and Justificationism outline
Critical Discussion
- search for flaws in ideas in order to improve them
- we need to error correct instead of looking for support for ideas
- we cannot prove an idea is not wrong
- there can always exist a mistake that we are not aware of
- criticism works logically because they can contradict something
- logical asymmetry between criticism and supporting arguments
- if the criticism is correct then the criticized idea must be incorrect
- it’s impossible to make supporting arguments that if they are true then the idea they support must also be true, there’s no logical connection, other than compatibility, i.e. non-contradiction
- there’s nothing you can do to guarantee that there doesn’t exist a flaw you aren’t aware of
- it’s like asking to guarantee that god doesn’t exist
- it’s asking to prove the non-existence of something you don’t have contradictory arguments against
- there’s nothing you can do to guarantee that there doesn’t exist a flaw you aren’t aware of
- it’s impossible to make supporting arguments that if they are true then the idea they support must also be true, there’s no logical connection, other than compatibility, i.e. non-contradiction
- supporting arguments cannot rule out flaws in ideas, but criticism can rule out ideas as true
- this means criticisms are decisive while supporting arguments aren’t
- adding more supporting arguments doesn’t help against criticism or lessen the likelihood for there being flaws in the idea
- if the criticism is correct then the criticized idea must be incorrect
- logical asymmetry between criticism and supporting arguments
- thus the point of discussion should be find and fix errors
- CR says to judge ideas by how well they survive criticism
- the more ideas are tested the better
- critical preference: preferring ideas that are more vigorously criticized and have survived
- CF disagrees and says we should judge ideas as refuted or non-refuted
- we should only act on ideas that haven’t been decisively refuted
- CF’s approach is binary whereas CR’s approach is analog
- CR does’t give much details on how to do critical discussion but CF has invented new methods
Justificationism
- the idea that says positive arguments can say how good an idea is
- can use supporting arguments, supporting evidence, proofs etc.
- single ideas aren’t enough but multiple can add up to a justified belief
- judge ideas by amount of goodness
- justified true belief
- true is infallibilist and perfectionist
- anything later found out to contain an error wasn’t knowledge at all
- but in reality lots of ideas are useful even though we later found errors in them
- anything later found out to contain an error wasn’t knowledge at all
- belief deny books and genes have knowledge in them
- true is infallibilist and perfectionist
- JTB has lots of known problems but they think the stuff CR criticizes is fine
- some are fallibilists and look for probable ideas or justified high confidence in ideas
- evidence/observation doesn’t speak for itself. evidence has to be interpreted to be used
- many accept decisive criticism in addition to positive arguments
- ideas refuted by evidence
- ideas with internal logical contradiction
- then ideas they say can’t be ruled out with decisive criticism has to weighed with their pros and cons
- none of this works because establishing ideas as good or true is impossible
- an ideas can be false no matter how many good traits it has
- there are infinite ideas with the same positive traits but reach different conclusions
- I think this point is relevant because the positive arguments doesn’t differentiate the idea from the other ideas with the same same positive traits
- criticism contradicts an idea
- contradiction is a meaningful relationship whereas positive arguments only say there’s a failure to contradict
- non-contradiction is not support
- contradiction is a meaningful relationship whereas positive arguments only say there’s a failure to contradict
And there are infinitely many other ideas, in the set of all logically possible ideas, that have all of those good traits but reach wildly different conclusions.
At first I didn’t understand why this was relevant. Is it relevant because the supported idea isn’t differentiated from all the other ideas that share the good traits, and they have different conclusions so the supported conclusion isn’t actually supported?
This applies to non-refuted as well, right? But there the assumption is that better ideas exist but the one non-refuted idea we have is the best we have, and so we accept it for that and nothing more like guaranteed true.
From my pre-idea writing:
Actually I don’t know why CR says the probability doesn’t increase. If I assume there exist a finite number of ravens then I could use an easier example to illustrate the same point. Instead I say I draw a ball from a bag with X amount of balls and observe that it’s black, if we assume uniform probability for black vs nonblack on every other ball (X + 1 different configurations being equally likely) then we can calculate the probability for any X, and the probability would increase for each black ball we drew out. Does CR say the principle of indifference is wrong, can I not extrapolate from the balls in the bag to ravens in the universe?
I couldn’t figure out after reading the section.
I think this all took like 4 hours.