The conflict Over the last year, I’ve been trying to better understand Deutsch’s worldview in general and how it intersects with rationalism in particular. In my piece Deutsch Eats Rationalism, which was an honoroble mention in ACX’s book review contest, I wrestled with the idea that Deutsch’s worldview is caustic to rationalism.
"Empiricism is just the position that our knowledge comes from the outside world via our senses. This runs completely contra to Popper and Deutsch. Rather, our knowledge comes from bold conjectures about the world (people are universal explainers). These conjectures are uncertain (people are fallibile). And they are not sourced from repeated observations (induction cannot create knowledge)."
. The problem with the above is false dichotomy Empiricism is not everything , because you can't generate explanations just by looking. But it is not nothing, because a conjecture that has never been tested is not knowledge.
This has similar problems to Deutsch 's critique of induction. It is true that pure empiricism is not a source of explanations, but it does not follow that empiricism can play no useful role: empirical evidence can even play a role in Popperian science, as a source of refutation.
It is true that empirical data need interpretation. It follows that pure empiricism is useless, but does imply that empiricism has no use.
Kant got it right centuries ago: "Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions [sense data] without conceptions blind’
"Yet induction is false (as Hume pointed out) and we don’t use induction (as Popper pointed out but Hume was confused by). "
There's a lot to unpack there.
Deutsch has three problems with induction. The first is that it is not a source of explanations. The second is that never used.The third is that it is unusable, has no theoretical justification.
The first claim is true, but no longer relevant, because philosophy of science has moved on. The second and third claims are false.
Induction is both useful and easy to implement in AI s and organisms. It is very widely used inside and outside of science, including by people who claim to reject it! It can be shown to work by both probabilistic and conjecture arguments, ie. the fact that it cannot be justified in an infalliblist way is true, but does not matter.
In fact, Popper did not believe induction is never used, only that it is not useful for science.
Hume did not even consider probabilistic defences of induction , so Hume cannot be used to defeat Bayes.
Induction, as I have defended it, has limitations....it cannot generate novel hypotheses...nor can Bayes. But that's only one of Deutsch's claims against it. Induction can play a role without being the whole story.
Excellent piece and graphical organisation of the conflicts!
"Empiricism is just the position that our knowledge comes from the outside world via our senses. This runs completely contra to Popper and Deutsch. Rather, our knowledge comes from bold conjectures about the world (people are universal explainers). These conjectures are uncertain (people are fallibile). And they are not sourced from repeated observations (induction cannot create knowledge)."
. The problem with the above is false dichotomy Empiricism is not everything , because you can't generate explanations just by looking. But it is not nothing, because a conjecture that has never been tested is not knowledge.
This has similar problems to Deutsch 's critique of induction. It is true that pure empiricism is not a source of explanations, but it does not follow that empiricism can play no useful role: empirical evidence can even play a role in Popperian science, as a source of refutation.
It is true that empirical data need interpretation. It follows that pure empiricism is useless, but does imply that empiricism has no use.
Kant got it right centuries ago: "Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions [sense data] without conceptions blind’
"Yet induction is false (as Hume pointed out) and we don’t use induction (as Popper pointed out but Hume was confused by). "
There's a lot to unpack there.
Deutsch has three problems with induction. The first is that it is not a source of explanations. The second is that never used.The third is that it is unusable, has no theoretical justification.
The first claim is true, but no longer relevant, because philosophy of science has moved on. The second and third claims are false.
Induction is both useful and easy to implement in AI s and organisms. It is very widely used inside and outside of science, including by people who claim to reject it! It can be shown to work by both probabilistic and conjecture arguments, ie. the fact that it cannot be justified in an infalliblist way is true, but does not matter.
In fact, Popper did not believe induction is never used, only that it is not useful for science.
Hume did not even consider probabilistic defences of induction , so Hume cannot be used to defeat Bayes.
Induction, as I have defended it, has limitations....it cannot generate novel hypotheses...nor can Bayes. But that's only one of Deutsch's claims against it. Induction can play a role without being the whole story.
Found it. Starts at 1:17:25.
https://youtu.be/Q_Cs5iNazB8?t=4639
Deutsch appears fairly cautious on animal qualia. I can find the related interview, if you’re interested.