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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
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).
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.
