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From: eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Rejoinder to "Anti-empiricism considered useless"
Message-ID: <116@snark.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 10-Jul-87 06:32:54 EDT
Article-I.D.: snark.116
Posted: Fri Jul 10 06:32:54 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 14:07:05 EDT
References: <3984@utai.UUCP>
Organization: Thyrsus Enterprises, Malvern PA 19355
Lines: 94
Summary: you raise some good points

Mr. Ostrum responds with a generally lucid, closely-reasoned argument which
is an excellent rejoinder to what he thought I was advocating. The fact that
he had my position not quite right is my fault; I used the term 'empiricist'
too loosely (as I explained in my reply to Gene Ward Smith). In that posting,
I gave informal definitions to each of the terms I am using. To recap:

  rationalist = "I believe what my reason tells me"
  empiricist = "I believe what my senses tell me"
  pragmatist = "I do what works"
  verificationist = "'Truth' is what independent observers can agree on."
  operationalist = "'Truth' is what one can predict experimental results with."

In my reply to Mr. Carnes I waved the banner of 'empiricism' because of his
characterization (historically correct) of the scientific stance as 'broadly
empiricist'. I think I have since made it clear that I am actually arguing
for a sophisticated form of operationalism as the 'natural' stance of science.

In article <3984@utai.UUCP>, cbo@utai.UUCP writes:

> empiricism is just as religious as realism, yet far less satisfying and
> far less plausible. It insists upon a principled metaphysical and semantic
> distinction between the nontheoretical (which we can directly observe)
> and the theoretical (the unobservable, which we can only infer), in which
> the former of these is taken as somehow primary, and the latter as defined.

I can agree with this as a criticism of Hume et al. A properly formulated
operationalism gets around having to make 'theoretical' vs. 'nontheoretical
distinctions at all -- 'theories' and 'percepts' are both simply elements
of predictive models held in the minds of observers.

> The question dividing various kinds of anti-realism and realism is: can
> a scientifically sensible story be told in which the instrumental utility of
> knowledge is accounted for without appealing to notions of correspondence
> truth? Common sense folk psychology suggests the answer is no: generally,
> the reason that knowledge is "useful" in predicting and doing "things" is
> that it is true.

One of the things that makes these discussions difficult is that human brains
aren't wired for philosophical correctness. The fact that 'folk psychology'
argues for correspondence truth is very poor evidence; 'folk psychology' argues
for a great many utter fallacies. That last sentence is an *assumption*!

> Attempts to escape this result by appealing to its
> "usefulness" in satisfying desires run aground on the embarrassing problem
> that satisfaction conditions for desires are the same kind of thing as
> truth conditions for beliefs. A desire, after all, is for a certain
> proposition to be rendered true.

Ah, but 'satisfying desires' isn't the criterion an operationalist uses --
'predictive strength' is. That is capable of being evaluated without this
circularity, which I think is mostly a linguistic artifact anyhow.

>                            As methodology, it fails because no one could
> seriously do any work if she thought the theoretical terms in her theory
> were defined operationally or in terms of the ways of verifying sentences
> containing them.

No? Quantum physicists *have* to work that way because their objects of study
behave so counterintuitively. In fact, what's generally misled you (I think)
is a confusion between

	1) the intuitive means by which theories are formulated
	2) the methods by which they must be analyzed and confirmed

I used to be a metamathematician. One of the jokes in that small, odd
subculture is to the effect that all mathematicians are Platonists before
publication and Formalists afterwards; that is, we think and talk about
mathematics informally as though we were studying some kind of ideal world
of existent things, but we ground our *proofs* of mathematics in a strict
formalist insistance on the rules of 'a game played with marks on paper' --
and this is precisely as it should be.

There is a similar though less widely recognized duality in scientific thought.
A scientist in a field where the objects of study behave 'intuitively' may
(most of the time) think as a realist and find his process of theory-building
assisted thereby; indeed, as Mr. Ostrum points out, it is decidedly difficult
for humans (wired as they are) to function otherwise. However, when the chips
are down, the theory has to be evaluated operationally -- *by testing its
predictive power*. The analogy is exact, and instructive.

To re-emphasize: the 'philosophical stance of science', is implied by its
criteria for *validating* theories, *not* by the 'folk psychology' of how
scientists dream up their theories.

Mr. Ostrum then devotes several paragraphs to a dissection of naive
empiricism, with which I largely agree. I am skeptical of his claim that
only Chomskians deal with intersubjectivity (it seems to me any linguist
would have to or give up the field) however. Would any linguist care to
comment?
 
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond
      UUCP:  {{seismo,ihnp4,rutgers}!cbmvax,sdcrdcf!burdvax,vu-vlsi}!snark!eric
      Post:  22 South Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355    Phone: (215)-296-5718