Not really. All science is based on evidence. We are just getting better at it. Newton gives way to Einstein, who in turn may well be shown to be inadequate. Einstein's work is observable. If not then its not valid. — charleton

You can't ignore the role of theory in science. Positing concepts to explain phenomena is as central to science, as is putting those ideas to the test.

You are just being ridiculous. Nothing can be conceived unless perceived.
Put a new born baby in a sensory deprivation chamber and see what you get.
You have not really used joined up thinking. — charleton

And nothing can be perceived without cognition. Remove a newborn baby's neocortex and see what knowledge they will learn.

Let's take gravity as an example. On a Humean account, gravity is just a shorthand for objects behaving in a similar attractive manner, such that bowling balls and feathers fall at the same rate on Earth, or the planets orbit in the same manner around the sun.

But Einstein notices a connection between acceleration and gravity, and posits the acceleration of objects through curved space as the gravitational force. So now you've moved from a shorthand for particulars to a very general principle. And not only are objects part of the principle, but light itself, which we have measured. Large distortions in space result in gravitational lensing. And furthermore, length and time get tied into this, along with frames of references.

That sort of scientific theory, like natural selection in biology, goes very much farther beyond noticing similar behavior among particulars over time. It explains why the particulars behave in a similar manner. That's fundamental to scientific theories.

OR - you could answer my question "Tell me the non perceptual source of knowledge of which you speak!" — charleton

Cognition is the non-perceptual source of knowledge.

Our brains honed by evolution in conjunction with the causal environment we perceive. Our brains are necessary to make any sense of raw sensory data, but our brains can do this because the environment is causal.

You are talking and saying nothing. — charleton

Eh heh.

Now, to reason means to find some data set U that is a superset of this data set K. Our method of reasoning works by choosing the most similar data set. In other words, it goes through every data set within some category of data sets that are supersets of data set K in order to choose the one that is the most similar to K. That's all there is to reasoning. — Magnus Anderson

Can you translate General Relativity into set theory?

Better yet, can you transform Evolutionary Biology into data sets? I'd love to see how natural selection falls out of that.

That's hilarious. How else do you think you can form a theory? By simply making shit up? That's what dogmatists do. They invent a theory and then they focus on the facts that support it and ignore those that contradict it. — Magnus Anderson

No, I don't think brute particulars are enough to provide the basis for any theory. That's the fundamental problem with empiricism.

The problem you have is that you cannot accept that predictions and theories are fallible. You cannot live with this fact. You think that if something is fallible it is necessarily useless. — Magnus Anderson

No, the problem is that I don't think you can get from brute particulars to any sort of theory, nor do I think brute particulars would behave in any sort of necessary relationship.

Hume's view does not lead to skepticism and it does not make science impossible. — Magnus Anderson

It does, because you have have no justification for coming up with predictive models. Nothing happens for any reason. Just because the sun's always shone doesn't mean we have any reason for coming up with a mechanism for it shining tomorrow. And as such, there's no reason to apply predictive models to the past before human experience. Maybe the universe was entirely different. Maybe the sun popped into existence along with human beings.

It's precisely that there are only "brute particulars that happen to always behave a certain way". Laws are merely human inventions that are based on a selection of these brute particulars. Any other way of thinking is already a form of dogmatism and absolutism. — Magnus Anderson

Then scientists are dogmatists and absolutists, because they certainly go beyond brute particulars just happening to behave a certain way to overarching theories explaining how living things came to exist, or stars formed, or how stellar fusion results in heavier elements, which gravity acts upon to form rocky planets and so on.

If those who accumulate great wealth are motivated mostly just by the desire to create great wealth (and the power that comes with that) for themselves, do you think that such a situation is morally acceptable and should be tolerated, or even encouraged? — Janus

I think it depends on whether this has a net benefit for society or not, and whether the solution to people motivated in such a way produces a better result or not.

Capitalism operates under the assumption that self-interested economic behavior results in net benefits for society. Of course there has to be some rules in place for this to work, and maybe capping the absolute wealth one can accumulate should be one of those. But then again, you might be disincentivizing the would be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk's of the world. So it's not entirely obvious what we should do.

I agree though when it comes to power that we need to limit any individual's influence. But a large part of that is what modern democracies are set up to do. They may need to be tweaked to take into account undo monetary influences.

Whatever work you want this point to do, if you accept it you just argue against your own view. — Πετροκότσυφας

I'm not accepting Kant's version of causality. Rather, I'm critiquing Wittgenstein & Hume's.

— The Emergence and Development of Causal Representations by Xiang Chen in Philosophy and Cognitive Science II — Πετροκότσυφας

The question here is whether human beings could learn a concept like causality just from experience, or whether the brain is wired to develop along those lines in response to experiences. A similar argument has been made for language learning. You could apply it to math as well. Of course we learn basic math, but we also have the capacity for learning math somehow, which most animals don't (some birds and apes demonstrate siimple arithmetic abilities).

Obviously you have to conceptualise, but you can only conceptualise FROM sensory information which is the source of ALL knowledge - quite obviously. — charleton

Not quite obviously, or Plato and Kant wouldn't have objected to that and come up with their own schemes for how knowledge is possible.

Locke suggests we start as a Tabula Rasa, I do not exactly agree with that, yet without the sensations we have nothing to work on. — charleton

Yeah and people like Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky have argued otherwise.

I have no idea what your objection or solution to this rather obvious reality is. — charleton

The objection goes back to Plato in which he argued that the flux of the world presented by our senses cannot be a source of knowledge in and of itself.

The solution in modern terms is that our brains have built-in structures or modules for learning how to apply concepts to sensations to form knowledge.

Yes and no. They do not ask why, they DO ask how.
If you want to know why ask a priest, as they have all the answers ready made. — charleton

I'm not going to get into a semantic argument over when to use why and when to use how. I take scientific explanations to be causal reasons for the regularities we observe. Humean causation undermines that, which was Kant's concern.

). At any rate, there's no reason to suppose that cognitive science which examines the infants' abilities at causal representation supports Kant's apriorism and not Hume's habit theory. In fact, I think it tends towards the latter. — Πετροκότσυφας

I've heard otherwise. That young children quickly develop an intuition for object permanence and casual expectation.

I simply act in a certain fashion and then the sun comes up, without me having a reason for my behaviour. And the scientist after giving all of his verbal justifications acts similarly, without reasons. — sime

The reason for your behavior is because you evolved in a causal environment, where it makes sense for you to understand the consequences for actions that can lead to death or reproductive success.

t isn't. You are merely confused. And the reason why it is "valid" for us to think that the past will repeat in the future is because we have evolved in relatively stable environments. — Magnus Anderson

And why have we evolved in relatively stable environments? You realize that in order for biological evolution to happen, the physics have the universe has to be a certain way? It all goes back to the Big Bang. Pretty far reaching stuff. Offering evolution as an answer to why we presuppose causality is just begging the question of why evolution would exist at all in a merely contingent universe.

It is because of observations + habit. Our method of reasoning is a habit. This habit has evolved in relatively stable environments. — Magnus Anderson

No, it's not a habit. It's an evolved faculty for making sense of a causal world, just like eyes are an evolved organ for using light as a means to perceive objects.

You don't understand what the question "why the sun would rise hundreds of billions of times in a row?" means. That's the problem. When you ask a question such as "why X at point in time t?" you are asking "how can we calculate that the event X, and not some other event Y, will occur at point in time t based on events that occured before the event X?" That's all that is being asked by such a question. — Magnus Anderson

That's not at all what I mean by asking the why question. I mean the causal reason for why B always follows A, not how to calculate a prediction that B follows A. That's the difference between interpretations of QM (for example), and the shut up and calculate folks.

And I do understand it just fine, thanks.

The truth is that ONLY sensory impressions give us all the knowledge we will ever have. If that leads you to skepticism you'll just have to lump it. — charleton

Plato, Kant and plenty of others have disagreed with radical empiricism. Sensory impressions alone cannot give you any knowledge. You must be able to conceptualize your impressions.

It's not even a question. There is no more reason 'why' the "sun rises" than why there is a universe in the first place! — charleton

But cosmologists do ask and attempt to answer the question as to why the observable universe exists, and how it came to be the way it is. Saying there is no reason why is settling for skepticism before all possible science and metaphysics has been explored. How do we know there isn't a why?

Like with any rule or principle of necessity, what we mean by causality cannot be verbally represented but only behaviourally demonstrated, similar to how a mathematician cannot linguistically represent what he means by "infinity", for it is a rule pertaining to the behaviour of the mathematician and it is not an object that the mathematician is pointing at. — sime

I don't agree with that notion of mathematics at all. And as for the white/black swans, all that example shows is that induction means we can be wrong about what we take to be universal. That doesn't mean there aren't universal laws.

There are various suggestions as to what that something might be. As there are criticisms of them. But noone conception of causality seems to be free of legitimate criticism.

* What I understand here as necessary connection is "production", not just dependence. — Πετροκότσυφας

Good point. There needs to be something else to show why A necessarily follows B, but D only follows C by accident. Or to show how correlation differs from causation.

It's true that all conceptions of causation have difficulties. I lean toward an underlying relationship between phenomena, because it all came from a common starting point in or prior to the Big Bang, whether that was the quantum vacuum or what not

It's not that there are brute particulars that happen to always behave a certain way, it's that all the particulars are related in a way that necessitates their common behavior. And that's why physics has been so successful in unifying phenomena, such as electricity and magnetism.

In short, there are fundamental underlying relationships to the cosmos that explain the observed regularities. That's the causation, however it works.

Using that as an argument in favor of a metaphysically thick theory of causality is really weird, since what Kant does is to take causality out of the world and put it in us. — Πετροκότσυφας

Right, but the point was that Kant saw a big problem with Hume's view of causation, which was that it led to widespread skepticism, and made science impossible. So Kant's objective was to save science by reintroducing causality and other necessary categories as structures of human thought.

The consequence is the unknowable things in the themselves, but at least we're still able to do science confidently within our human filtered objective (or intersubjective) world of common experience.

So mechanics is just a limit state description of fluctuations gone to equilibrium. It is not the way the world fundamentally is - at the small or primal scale. But it is certainly the way the world has pretty much become once it has cooled and expanded enough to be completely constrained by its own history. — apokrisis

That's a much better attempt than mere regularity. Regularity renders everything as brute. The sun could stop shining for no reason, but it just continues to shine for no reason. The fact that we can come up with good explanations for many necessary situations belies this account of causation.

It's only when we get down to the quantum level, or are dealing with entropy that the causal explanations turn into probabilistic explanations, and we arrive at brute posits. But there's no reason to do that for phenomena we can provide causal explanations for. As such, Humean causation is impoverished.

The laws we devise are consequent on this and not things that the universe is compelled to obey. It's just the way things are. Making physical laws is just a short hand to assist us to describe our understanding, and as such are contingent on the continued observations we make. — charleton

That still doesn't answer the question as to why the sun would rise hundreds of billions of times in a row. The claims is that there is no reason for the sun to continue to shine, it just does. This is at odds with scientific explanation, which posits reasons why the sun shines, and thus it's perfectly valid for us to expect it to continue to do so. This isn't because of habit, it's because of gravity and nuclear physics.

Hume demands that we can only observe and record. The only way we can have knowledge about the universe is to see if our observations repeat, and by habitually we can come to conclusions a posteriori. — charleton

Kant doesn't think Hume can do this without causality being a structure of our cognitive capabilities. It's not that we observe B always following A and then come up with the concept of causality out of habit, it's that we're wired to filter the world that way. We expect causality to be a feature of the world like space & time, because that's how we experience the world.

Hume demands that we can only observe and record. The only way we can have knowledge about the universe is to see if our observations repeat, — charleton

The worry here expressed by both Plato and Kant is that skepticism is the result, not knowledge. Sensory impressions alone can't give us knowledge. There must be something that structures our experiences, whether it be Kantian categories of Plato's forms/remembrances.

See, I think that sounds perfectly sane. I think the reason you think it sounds absurd is because it goes against what you thought causality is (but is not.) — Magnus Anderson

Nah, I think it goes against any adequate explanation of necessary relations between A & B.

Information? So facts are cognitive things? I guess that the answer to the original question, then, is that facts are observer-dependent (even if the object/event/state-of-affairs isn't)? — Michael

Not sure, but I'm not comfortable with saying facts are out there in the world. There is a close relationship with facts and states of affairs, but they're not the same thing in my view. Consider that the facts can be wrong. States of affairs can't be wrong. But what we take to be the facts can be.

This suggests that facts are observer-dependent to an extent. And what sort of facts we're interested in will impact how we talk about a particular state of affairs. One could say that we generate facts (or information) from our interactions with states of affairs, based on what we're interested in.

o what's a fact, if not the object/state-of-affairs? Is it the true statement? — Michael

It's information about the states of affairs, which can be as simple as noting the color property of grass, or the direction the object is moving.

And what are states of affairs? Facts or objects? — Michael

Objects or events. The facts are gleaned from the states of affairs.

I don't know. Do true statements refer to facts or objects? Does the statement "the ball is falling" refer to the fact that the ball is falling or to the falling ball? — Michael

True statements regarding empirical conditions have to refer to objective states of affairs other people can verify, however we wish to metaphysically classify those things. The ball is falling is true when it corresponds to an empirical situation with a falling ball.

where the green grass is just a statement based on individual experience that is much like the beetle in Wittgenstein's box. — Posty McPostface

It can't just be individual experience per Wittgenstein's no private language argument. Statements of facts must be sociological. Other people agree that the grass is green such that we can construct propositions about it.

I have a hard time with the concept that B following A always happens, but it could also not happen. It just so happens in our universe that the sun will continue to shine as long as the physicists estimate, but the nuclear/gravitational process that produces fusion might not hold tomorrow for no reason.

In the podcast, they were noting that Wittgenstein's analysis showed that scientific laws are mistaken when presented as reasons for why things always happen a certain way. The sun doesn't shine every day because of gravitational pressure resulting in fusion of atoms, that's just what a bunch of atoms in the sun happen to do for billions of years. But they might not tomorrow. However, in our universe, it just happens to be the case that they will (or so we think).

Thus Wittgenstein/Hume can preserve necessity (if B does end up always following A), while not introducing any mysterious causality. That sounds absurd.

This does not imply that they are a matter of chance. Indeed, admitting that they are a matter of chance would amount to offering a further explanation—a chancy one—of their presence. The friends of RVC firmly deny the alleged need to appeal to a different ontological category (something which is not a regularity but has metaphysical bite) to explain the presence of regularities — Psillos

But the claim was that the sun could cease to rise (shine) tomorrow. That it continues to rise is just a contingency that has always held to this point.

I don't see how that's different from the coin always landing heads. It could land tails, but it just doesn't. That sounds no different than probability, except we wouldn't know what sort of probability to assign to a star ceasing to shine, since we haven't observed that.

I always felt some sympathy for poor Madame Guyon. — Wayfarer

You've read Madame Guyon? Her stuff is pretty deep. Sort of reminds me of Buddhism in a way, with a Christian interpretation. The whole attempt to achieve union with God sounds like trying to achieve Nirvana, death to self sounds like becoming detached from desire, and so on. Runs a lot deeper than your average religious teaching, anyway.

Life is not Jeopardy folks! — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Don't you mean Wheel of Fortune?

What what did he put between which what? What what is what? — Sapientia

Depends on what the definition of what was. I wonder what Augustino is doing about all this.

I'm rather upset you put what in between two whats. Ruined my night.

Is it what it is?

Confirmed universe is click baiting physicists.