A Clarification of 'A Rejoinder to Phillip Gregory.'

I blogged what I thought was a very clear essay yesterday.  But Philip Gregory offered  a rebuttal that, although did not show weaknesses in my intended position, has shown weaknesses in my formulation of that position. To give some background, the following is the paragraph to which Philip Gregory is responding:

"To get back to the problem  at hand: The issue of justification is not solved, because evolution, although it gives us a universal set of expectations, it does not give us a universally valid set of expectations (or innate cognitive abilities). So even if something fits in with our expectations and theories, ie it is coherent with the system, that does not mean they are true, or become more or less true, because they are more or less coherent with that system. If there is something wrong with one of our evolutionary expectations and our background theories, and our theory is coherent with it, then the error contained in the expectation or theory carries over to the hypothesis, and is therefore not justified, we can never know fully whether there is not an error in our expectations or theories. This is just to say that our expectations, and evolution itself, are fallible, i.e not justificatory. There is fallibitilty at the core of human knowledge and experience."

And this is Philip Gregory's rebuttal:

"As a quick rebuttal, I will say that you are missing the point because you have not accepted my revision of epistemology, and your rebuttal amounts to: I don't like coherentism because it can result in some falsities whilst having a coherent web of beliefs. To that I say: oh well, such is life. Whether you like the fact that coherentism can result in false beliefs or not is not a sufficient rebuttal "

I think a relatively clear rebuttal, but it does not quite hit the target.

But first, to clear up any confusion about what I do and don't have to accept, If he claims that I have to accept his epistemology to "get the point", he is merely saying that unless I accept his epistemology as true, he will not believe that I understand it. This is an illegitimate burden to place on somebody and a burden I will not own.

Secondly I did not say I disliked (I never made any claims about my likes or dislikes) coherentism because it leads to false conclusions. I said that human knowledge is fallible at the core and therefore no justificationist stance could work, and in this particular case, coherentism. I further delineated (or tried to) that coherentism fails in its own goals. That goal is (this time I am going to try to make it more clear) is to confer reliability to our theories, statements hypotheses etc. Coherentism says that something increases in reliability if it is logical and it fits in with our already conjectured knowledge and expectations (This, in psychology, is known as confirmation bias). We can attack this view in the same way we can attack other justificationist views by turning it upon itself. in this way we can ask how reliable or justified, or even coherent, coherentism is? To make it clear what I mean, consider the following: If the background knowledge is false, but we believe it to be true, and we confer an increase in reliability to a hypotheses because it fits in with our current theories expectations or whatever and it is (logically) valid, has the reliability of the hypothesis actually increased? if not then coherentism is false and has not done the job that it is intended to do. Therefore we can abandon coherentism, and because all justificatory epsitemologies are false (they founder on the horns of agrippa's/munchausen's trillemma), we can adopt robust fallibalism (not just the weakening to partial justifcatory methods also known perversly as fallibalism) as the only currently rational option (this does not mean I consider it a certain method or even a partially reliable method, I am merely claiming it is the only one that is not logically questionable).  So I am not claiming that I dislike Coherentism because it leads to falsities; I am objecting to it because it does not do the thing it claims to do, namely increase the reliability of our hypotheses, theories or statements.

A Rejoinder to Phillip Gregory.

Phillip Gregory is a youtuber who talks about topics in Philosophy. I wish to engage with a section of a post he made where he objects to Popper's abandonment of induction. In this post he tries to save justification through a ( not very coherently argued) coherentist stance with elements of a narrow Popperian view, while also trying to differentiate his view (speculative rationalism) from Popper's (Critical Rationalism). There are two initial problems with this attempted differentiation from Popper. Firstly he does not consider any arguments against induction put forward by Popper, which are severe and not yet rebutted successfully. Secondly there is no mention of the succinct exposition of why all types of justification lead to insoluble problems, popularized by Hans Albert, which he called Munchhausen’s Trilemma.

Let's get started:

"Another objection I foresee is concerning my use of the term “speculative conjecturalism”. How, some might ask, does my philosophy differ from Karl Popper’s falsification theory?"

His account is almost identical to Popper's, but he only attributes falsification and the abandonment of induction to Popper,  missing out the fact that Popper has an entire metaphysic and epistemology (evolutionary epistemology) that made his position robust, and much of which  Phillip Gregory whole-heartedly adopts without so much as recognizing the fact. Many people who misunderstand falsification/falsifiability (PG included) do so because they do not see how it fits into Popper's larger picture, and end up trying to save perceived weaknesses in Popper's account (which would only be weaknesses if Karl Popper did not have the larger framework) by incorporating some kind of justificationist viewpoint to sit uneasily alongside falsifiability.

"The answer lies in the fact that Popper discards induction, arguing that it has no place in science, but nevertheless does not explain fully the sources from which our theories arise – at least, not to my satisfaction."

Popper discards induction because there is no defence of it that has worked, and no successful criticisms of his (and Hume's) arguments against induction. Anyone who wishes to import induction into a viewpoint much like Popper's first needs to rebut at least one of those arguments, if not all of them, because Popper conjectured that just one of them was sufficient to show that induction is false.

 "I would like to make the point that in some cases at least, or theories might arise from the void, much like our thoughts arise from the void."

I am not sure what he means by the void, and he has not foreshadowed it. Inductive reasoning to hypotheses are not hypotheses that "arise from the void", because induction is about inference from observation. Not from the void (whatever that might be).

"We can only explain our thoughts in retrospect, much like we can only establish the usefulness of a theory, in Popper’s opinion, in retrospect."

I think what Popper meant was that when we take induction as an explanation of how we come up with hypothesis about the world we are doing it as a rationalization of guesswork, because we don't want to admit that our theories are guesses - our mind/brain is like a highly imaginative guessing machine. Furthermore, induction is actually impossible, because there is no such thing as a non-theoretical informed observation. To wit, that we have had a successful and veridical observation is itself a guess, based on theoretical conceptions of what an observation is. (this argument was first elaborated eloquently by David Deutsch in his book The Beginning of Infinity).

"In other words, we do not always formulate hypotheses, because that would require conscious agency."

Our brain/mind formulates hypotheses. If this requires conscious  agency, then so be it.

"Rather, hypotheses arise from the void, or more precisely, as a web of ideas that reflects our innate and universal cognitive principles."

Hypotheses do not arise from the void, they are  guesses based on our current (conjectured) knowledge and our expectations.

"This web gets us into the territory of coherentism, and issue of justification is solved, because our beliefs systems are justified, not by any one belief, as in the case of foundationalism, but by coherence with the system. "

This needs to be given some context. Phillip Gregory states earlier in his essay, that evolution give us a universal set of cognitive principles. So he is saying here that because we have these belief systems which are justified (the univeral set of cognitive principles) that therefore anything that fits in with them is justified.


 I would modify his conjectured to state that through evolution we developed a set of expectations, each person having a mostly overlapping subset of these expectation, and very many different cognitive abilities, yet again, each person has a more or less abundant subset of these, but each person's subset are mostly similar to others and overlap with others to a great extent.

But this means that the issue of justification is not solved, because evolution, although it gives us a universal set of expectations, it does not give us a universally valid set of expectations (or innate cognitive abilities). So even if something fits in with our expectations and theories, ie it is coherent with the system, that does not mean they are true, or become more or less true, because they are more or less coherent with that system. If there is something wrong with one of our evolutionary expectations and our background theories, and our theory is coherent with it, then the error contained in the expectation or theory carries over to the hypothesis, and is therefore not justified, we can never know fully whether there is not an error in our expectations or theories. This is just to say that our expectations, and evolution itself, are fallible, i.e not justificatory. There is fallibitilty at the core of human knowledge and experience.