A Theory of Error?

General Philosophy
81

Yes. My remarks about dialectic were in response to your saying that we ought to reject a view that holds philosophy to be foundational. That in turn was your response to my asking you to say more about your intriguing idea that we can sidestep the “trap” of using philosophy to explain philosophy.

At least this is my best reconstruction.

I like the import of this, but by “immune to disagreement” do you mean that objections can’t even be framed coherently? We could call that absolute immunity to disagreement, whereas raising coherent objections which are then shown to be mistaken would demonstrate a lesser sort of immunity. I dunno – is this something like what you have in mind? I’m just fishing for the distinction implied by absolute immunity.

OK, good. So this describes a different way of seeing, and thus posing different questions. I wonder if philosophy’s way of seeing, and questioning, leads directly to the lack of resolution that is the subject of this thread. Most of us seem to think it does, in some fashion, whether for better or for ill.

Yes, that’s put better, thanks.

Yes, that’s the specter of infinite disagreement that we’re examining. Is it obvious, though, that it must be impossible to settle definitively on the criteria for evaluating a theory of error? I agree that the “view from nowhere” problem is similar in structure, but what we’re looking for here is not absolute truth or correctness, but only a way of achieving resolution. Am I wrong in thinking that makes a difference?

I realize you allude to this when you talk about “a more-or-less intersubjective compromise agreement to settle a problem and move on.” But here too you seem to believe it’s obvious that “the standards governing this agreement will always be contestable.” Well, contestable, perhaps, in the sense that someone could contest the origin of species or the atomic theory of molecular construction. But such contests wouldn’t derail the resolution around those answers, it seems to me. They would be addressed on the merits, and refuted.

So we have to say why philosophy is different in this regard. And I think it is different, but I’m not yet sure how to describe the difference.

And this connects directly with:

@Pat makes a similar point above.

Right, philosophy doesn’t, or shouldn’t, accept an object of inquiry as being uninterpreted. Worse yet, we have to interpret, or at least reflect upon and acknowledge, the standards and practices that govern hermeneutics itself – what it means to interpret anything! This too requires an interpretation.

Your First World War example suggests a line of approach. Suppose that what we lack, re causes of the war, is not so much compelling evidence as it is a compelling theory of how human events are caused. If we had such a theory, we could then look at the evidence in its light. Moreover, the theory might actually help us find more and better evidence, because now we’d know in which direction to look.

But notice that such a theory of human-event causation could not come from within the discipline of history itself. It is a philosophical, or possibly psychological or economic or sociological, question. To ask historians to be an authority on this takes them outside their scope. As you say, “even if the scientist’s presuppositions are actually operative, they are bracketed in the practice itself.”

Can a similar move occur with philosophical questions? My contention is that it cannot; dialectical movement stops with philosophy, like it or not. I don’t think the kind of bracketing described above can be successful in philosophy, or not completely.

Again, this doesn’t mean that knowledge or love or insight stop with philosophy – God no! It’s only dialectic that comes to a halt.

82

As I said before, you’re being taken in by a sleight of hand performed by empirical disciplines. This sleight of hand is provide by the flattening, abstracting logico-mathematical terminology that is intrinsic to the sciences. This gives the illusion that they agree where philosophers do not agree. In fact , what you are seeing is a masking of individual differences in interpretation of the facts. For instance, there are a multitude of interpretations of quantum mechanics, lining up neatly with various positions within the history of philosophy.

Physicists have no choice but to understand what they are doing when they practice physics through some interpretation. The fact that these perspectives vary as much as those of philosophers is lost to most scientists because they have a generalizing, abstractive vocabulary to place over these disagreements which they can ‘agree’ on This surface agreement doesn’t make the underlying differences disappear, it makes them un-noticeable, whereas philosophical positions are designed to highlight the disagreements.

83

The question which needs to be asked is whether this inability of philosophy to ‘get out of’ the hermeneutic circle doesn’t also apply to the hard sciences. Dilthey would say no, Gadamer and Kuhn would say yes.

You’re looking for a realist grounding of philosophical questions in empiricism, but I think what this is trying to do is to flip the picture on its head by taking the derived, abstractive product (objectively causal science) as the explanatory ground for what is more originary and primary as the condition of possibility of such abstractive knowledge (our historical practices in the lifeworld).

For Kuhn, we can determine that one scientific paradigm solves more puzzles than another, but we cannot resolve disputes between approaches on the basis of correctness-error. That is, on the basis of the assumption that what the aim of science is to grasp onto what is ‘really the case’ in nature. Kuhn’s approach to both science and philosophy is not a theory of error, it is a theory of pragmatic usefulness.

A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovering and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a better representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there.”

Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving.

But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some mportant respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s. Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be relativism, I cannot see that the relativist loses anything needed to account for the nature and development of the sciences.

84

If I can join your conversation with @Pat . . . There’s a lot of truth in what you say about science. But does the “illusion of agreement” go all the way down, to the common- or garden-variety realism that undergirds our interactions with the world – the same world that science purports to interpret?

What I mean is rather simple-minded. If you and I take a walk, and we both note an oak tree as we pass it, is our agreement illusory? If it is not, then on what exactly are we agreeing? This has nothing much to do with quantum indeterminacy, and everything to do with how we encounter our shared world. Is this also “surface agreement,” as you put it? Are there “underlying differences” in how you and I conceive of the oak tree? There may be, in the sense that you may have in mind a more sophisticated picture of that material object than I do. But isn’t our agreement based on the far from superficial fact that we both see an oak tree?

Right. Do you think the differences between, say, Dilthey and Gadamer come down to a different view about what the “getting-out” would look like?

I understand what you mean, but I don’t think that’s quite what I’m doing in the case of the imaginary “theory of human-event causation.” You’re suggesting that such a theory would be trying to ground a philosophical closure concerning cause and effect, based on our historical practices. Whereas in fact, the relation is the reverse – it is our practices that explain the development of such a theory.

At a very abstract level, this may be true. But in our daily practices of inquiry, and in the frameworks of the various inquiring disciplines, I don’t think it stands up. If a musicologist is looking for a theory to explain why the well-tempered scale prevailed in Western music, they’re going to examine the available evidence – the historical record – and try to match that evidence with a theory about historical and musical change. If they come up with such a theory, they may well discover that it’s even better grounded than they had supposed, because in light of what the theory can explain, we now can see evidence where before there was merely data.

The point is that of course the chicken-and-egg question you pose will not disappear. We can always ask, Does the practice explain the theory, or the theory explain the practice? What I’m saying is that progress in something like musicology depends on assuming that, for our purposes, a theory that explains something we want explained is a good or successful theory, regardless of the historical story of its origins, and the possible resulting de-absolutization (if that’s a word) of the theory.

(This, BTW, is completely in keeping with the Kuhnian perspective you offer, I would say. The musicologist can be agnostic about “absolute correctness” while standing up for pragmatic usefulness in solving problems and enhancing insight.)

85

I think I may have been unclear there, by “universal,” I didn’t mean everyone is ignorant of everything, but rather that everyone lacks knowledge about some things (presumably the intractable issues). All I wanted to get at was the linkage between “not all (or most) agree, therefore no one has come to a correct conclusion.”

As to why,I think people have offered many plausible answers here.

Here is another: in the Enchiridion, Epicetus says that philosophy is like building a house. When a housebuilder comes to demonstrate their art, they do not discourse on building a house, but rather begin building. So it is for the love of wisdom, at least for Epicetus.

But since the building is arduous and time consuming, likely requiring an apprenticeship of sorts, many may not choose to engage in it. Moreover, the novice has no way to know if the master is truly a master until they have lived in a house for a time, to see if it leaks, falls over, etc. And so there is an element of trust as well.

And, to push the analogy, it seems perfectly possible that someone could be a very good house builder and not know how to describe how to be a good house builder (and moreover that no one can learn how to be a master builder without themselves building). Maybe the most skilled could leave instructions, but this doesn’t seem to be a requirement for being a master builder, and the novice has no way to vet instructions anyhow, and there are many.

Plus, we could layer in the difficulty that the ideal house might vary by person, even if all good houses share things in common, so that it is an arduous process for each individual to build their own abode.

In this context, propositional doctrines are maybe more like indoor appliances. Sure, you can buy them from someone else, but if you haven’t gotten your electricity working or you don’t know how to install them, they won’t do you any good. Plenty of philosophy seems to get used, in practice, like an electric range with no electricity, so that the same form (the proposition) is forced to merely serve as a heavy, ugly cupboard, or some such.

To @Pat’s point, maybe something else needs to anchor understanding. But since philosophy is as broad as Wisdom herself, the anchoring may need to be an entire life.

Whereas, pulling out propositions to compare as such always takes place in a particular context, and so in a way is like pulling off bits and pieces of another’s house and then judging it by how well it fits into one’s own.

Maritain makes the point that history, unlike the sciences, deals with the particular rather than the universal. However, it is unique in that it deals with the particular in which all universals are instantiated. I thought that was a clever insight (even if he was besmirching Big Heg in context).

As to the question of an endless regress of criteria, I suppose that would entail a view of knowledge as something like a endless, unsecured web of discursive inferences? I would disagree with this view though. Reason has a proper ordering. Theoretical reason is ordered to Truth, and practical reason to Goodness (as aesthetic reason is ordered to Beauty). There is no infinite regress backwards, but rather an ascent upwards. We exist in the suspended middle, but there is an anchor holding us up above the abyss.

Of course, because truth and goodness are as wide as being (being themselves being as considered under some aspect, i.e., as knowable or desirable) this doesn’t negate the “inexhaustibility thesis,” but it does give it a different explanation. Truth then is the measure of error.

Now, if to know anything exhaustively requires that we know everything (either because context matters in the “horizontal” dimension, or because all principles point to greater principles above them in the “vertical” direction) it is indeed folly to seek “absolute certainty” in human knowledge. However, I’d disagree that it isn’t desirable per se, although it is not desirable to chase after what is impossible.

86

I think the issue is that there is not an established theory of everything, or an established theory of which premises are necessary and/or complete.

Goedel’s theorem would seem to say that such a theory of everything is impossible. Probably the edge of knowledge is always an argument about which premises & logical inferences are necessary/logical/permissibile.

87

Agreement doesn’t require identity, only similarity. I wouldn’t say identity is an illusion, I’d prefer to call it an abstraction or idealization. We make use of such idealizations not only when we say that you and I see the same tree, but when I say to myself, pointing to a scene, there is a persisting object there , a ‘thing’. Striving for the perfectly self-identical thing is an aim of my perceptual comportment toward the world, but I can only ever fulfill this aim partially, imperfectly, constructing more and more sedimented layers of correlations between my movements in relation to the object and the response of the object.

What appears as a result can approximate more and more closely to my projected idealizing expectations of the self-identical thing, but it will always remain subjective and relative. Moving from this solitary level of thing-construction to the intersubjective constituting of what we call empirically objective things involves another level of idealization. Now we say tha the differences between my perception of the tree and yours is a matter of varying perspectives of the empirically identical tree. But we can never exhaustively validate such a claim. What we can say is that the empirically ‘identical’ tree for all of us is seen on the basis of intersubjectively constructed similarities that make the notion of the empirical object a partially shared collective achievement.

88

I think I follow this. So on our walk, we do agree that the tree is an oak? And this is more than “surface agreement”? I’m trying to dumb this down to what we actually mean when we talk about agreeing with each other, and then ask if we are mistaken in so doing.

I’ll take quick shot at applying this analogy to phil.

The ones who “choose not to engage in it” are nonetheless presumably in the conversation somehow, otherwise their positions would not matter. So their choice not to engage is a kind of bad faith, or laziness, since they’re also claiming to disagree. So Philosopher A would say of them, “They don’t understand the issue” or “They haven’t done the reading” or something similar?

On the trust issue: One may disagree with Philosopher A because one doesn’t trust that A knows what they’re talking about. That’s rather odd, but I suppose it happens. Most philosophers, faced with such a situation, would I think ignore the trust question and simply explain why they think A is wrong, and thus not worthy of trust.

The one who can build, but not describe, a good house would be the philosopher who is a poor communicator of their ideas. Such a philosopher, if self-honest, might say, “The fault is mine. I can’t achieve resolution around this issue because I haven’t explained well enough why my position ought to resolve it.”

Are these some of the plausible answers you’re seeing?

89

Philosophy is so broad, it seems that everyone is in the conversation.

I don’t think bad faith or laziness would be the only explanations, there are myriad.

I’m by no means that committed to Epictetus’ general analogy here, but I think this is the exact opposite of his point, which is that philosophy is not just, or even primarily about discursive argument.

Plus, for that sort of disarming move to be on the table, philosophy has to be primarily about sets of discursive arguments, not doings. Otherwise, such an exercise would be the same as doubting a sailor’s ability to teach you to sail purely through discussing what they have to say about sailing, without ever getting into a boat.

So, Hegel? :laughing:

I am not sure if that works as the only explanation. It assumes that everything can be explained. That’s explicitly denied by Plato, and I take it that is Epictetus’ point as well.

90

Also Michael Polanyi. We know more than we can tell.

91

It’s a good OP because it asks a different question. In asking a different question, it points to its own answer. It’s probably a bit difficult to see how this is so, but let’s have a go.

But first, it might be worth reiterating the point that the fact of disagreement implies an overwhelming level of agreement. Consider, if you will, how much you and I must agree is the case in order for this discussion to even be occurring. I won’t labour the point; it can be found in the many discussions of On Certainty and On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Schema.

Our disagreements are always minutiae in comparison to that about which we agree. But our disagreements are also much more interesting, so we focus on them.

Let’s next look at plumbing. There are always different ways to plumb a building. It’s not just that we might run the pipes in various different ways, but that we might put the tap and toilet in various different locations, or add or subtract a sink here or there, or choose a heat pump or instant gas. There is no simple binary of right or wrong in plumbing a building. But we can well imagine, if we employ more than one plumber, their arguing about the many wheres and hows. And yet they agree that there are pipes and taps and drains, and they agree as to the general order in which these ought to be connected.

I hope the analogy with philosophy is apparent.

There’s also the topic I took up in my thread on An approach to aesthetics . Just as no sooner is a definition of Art given than some artist will seek to undermine it, in the name of art, no sooner is a philosophy given than some philosopher will seek to undermine it, in the name of philosophy.

All this by way of pointing out that disagreement is inherent in the very act of doing philosophy.

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92

But that’s precisely what my problematic is set up to deny. I’m maintaining that the problem of needing a theory of error only comes up as a philosophical problem when good, sophisticated, qualified philosophers disagree. Of course, if anyone can chime in, it doesn’t take much effort to explain why they get things wrong.

I’d regard that as in line with the view, which others have shared here, that propositional, argumentative truth may not be the goal of philosophy. I agree that’s a promising theory of error because it dissolves the “error” idea entirely. My only caveat is that we shouldn’t go down the road of trying to pin down what “philosophy” ought to mean or cover. For my purposes, the answer is: What we do here on TPF.

And approximately 61.2 % of all the great philosophers! (I can show you my paperwork if you’re interested. :wink:). Clear writing is not an identifying characteristic of philosophy, sadly.

Yes, I had meant to mention Polanyi, having vaguely remembered he said something pertinent, but forgot. Thanks.

93

Good to have you join us.

Your observation about shared agreements is important. I believe it underlies the frustration some of my non-philosophical friends and family members feel about our subject. “What in the world are they arguing about, and why? We all get up in the morning and go to work and love our kids, and we know what ‘morning’ and ‘work’ and ‘kids’ mean – aren’t those enough to agree on? That’s what actual life is, not your damn dialectic.”

The plumbing analogy requires a premise right at the start, namely that there are always different ways to do a good job philosophizing. I happen to think that’s true (along with some unsuccessful ways), but many philosophers don’t, and are attached to their positions and methods. To them, we can’t just point out that after all our philosophical pipes and taps and drains are OK, regardless if we’re Wittgensteinians or Freudians. They would deny this. What might we say in response, do you think?

Yes, to me that’s apparent. But disagreement is confusing because it seems to imply that solid-looking questions are in fact defective or unanswerable. (Either that or the philosophers are. :slightly_smiling_face:) Otherwise, how can two people who share the same intelligence and background and methods nonetheless disagree?

So what attitude should we take to this peculiar characteristic of philosophy? Should we say that no explanation of a particular disagreement is needed, since that’s just what philosophy does? My OP was floating the idea that we could do more, and suggesting that in fact we should want to do more, that it is potentially insightful to understand what Philosopher A would say about B’s disagreement, and vice versa.

94

Thanks.

Nicely put. And they are right, aren’t they? The doing is what counts. But we odd folk, we have a misplaced need to overthink stuff and make sense of it. We try to articulate the bits in a way that keeps them together and consistent, and it’s quite difficult work. Others only need the plumber when things start to smell, and dark fluids start to pool…

Think of a building with multiple plumbers working each to their own plan. They are all using pipes and taps and drains, but working out how to connect each other’s work, consistently…

It’ll be an “ongoing project’”. And so it’s a category error to think of philosophy as a body of knowledge, when it’s a process.

And it’s good for the plumbers to examine each other’s work, to see what works and what doesn’t, what is aesthetically pleasing and what is ugly. It is insightful to understand what Philosopher A would say about B’s disagreement, and vice versa.

95

Yes, except for those of who aren’t quite satisfied that we know what we’re doing. Notice I left out the word “love” in the list of the words we’re supposedly well-agreed about. We know how to love our kids until all of a sudden . . . we don’t.

This idea was on my list of “tentative thoughts” about a theory of error (which I’ll still get around to sharing). If the point of doing philosophy is the doing, this suggests that it could still be philosophy, and worthwhile, regardless of whether answers are agreed upon.

96

Yep.

And keep in mind that the idea of an “answer” in philosophy is fraught. Folk will keep thinking after the answer is provided, and find ways to look at it differently or issues unaddressed.

Not too unlike Gödel’s results for arithmetic. The process goes on.

1 Like
97

Suppose we change the rules of chess so that it is illegal to move any piece more than four squares, severely limiting the power of the Bishop, Rook, and Queen.

If someone were to move their Bishop five squares, their error would be that they broke the new rule. They were playing the game in the old way.

Differing philosophies might be more like rule changes than outright mistakes.

But suppose we were to change the rules so that when in check, the King may move to any unoccupied square. It now becomes impossible to checkmate. This rule is inconsistent with play as we understand it—it is impossible to end the game. Now that would be a poor rule, given our purposes.

Some philosophies might, in an analogous way, not be coherent. Their structure may be such that they do not permit or account for things we need.

Or suppose we change the rules so that a player keeps making a move until no further move is possible, so White moves first and keeps moving until they win.

Some sets of rules produce a playable game; others are no fun or render an outcome impossible.

Philosophy involves, in part, working out which rules might work.

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An Immaterial Philosophy of Mind
98

I see you made much the same point as I just did.

99

I see a relevance to the OP for Polya’s 4 step method

  1. Understand the question
  2. Devise a strategy
  3. Execute the strategy
  4. Check back
100

Only from one perspective though. Reasonable, sophisticated, smart people are going to reject that resolution. Such disagreement still has to be explained even if we no longer call it “error,” right? Otherwise we would just be solving the problem by relabeling it, or by diminishing its importance.

I fear that tension is going to follow any attempt to “dissolve” the issue. If the irresolvable problems are pseudo problems, or problems without answers, then why don’t all the reasonable sophisticated folk agree about this at least? And even if disagreement is reappraised as good, that alone doesn’t answer the question of why it exists and why people think of it as error.

Which isn’t to say that any “dissolving move” cannot help to explain things here, just that these also require an account of why such moves are likely to be rejected.