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.