Political Philosophy and Ethics discussion
Both Pol. and Ethical Philosophy
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Reason, Informal Logic, Evidence, and Critical Thinking
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Feliks
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Jul 08, 2018 10:52AM
Alan, is your list of reference materials for your project posted anywhere? I'd sure find that of interest
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My "Ethics" reading list is here, and my "Free Will" reading list is here. More generally, my "Philosophers" reading list (which contains many works relevant to ethics) is here. These are all Goodreads lists, which I frequently update. Needless to say, there is a lot of overlap among the lists.
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As a result of the Goodreads-imposed space limitations on the home page for introductory comments, that introductory section also stated in bold font: "see also the Rules and Housekeeping topic." Please note the following rules that I posted in that topic:
Post 3 (July 25, 2016): "After giving notice yesterday, I deleted the 'Martin Heidegger' topic this morning (US Eastern Time Zone). The posts in this topic went far off topic, discussing metaphysical . . . issues that had nothing to do with either political philosophy or ethics."
Post 4 (August 28, 2016): "Follow-up to my preceding post: The present 'Political Philosophy and Ethics' Goodreads group is focused on political philosophy and/or ethics. Discussions of such topics as metaphysics, ontology, analytic philosophy, and so forth are more appropriately posted in the 'Philosophy' Goodreads group unless they are relevant to political philosophy or ethics. Since logic is, to my mind, relevant to both political philosophy and ethics, I have no problem with discussions of logic here. Basically, the test is whether a post relates to questions about human ethics and/or human government. If it does not, it belongs elsewhere. " (Emphasis added.)
Post 6 (November 1, 2016): "Follow-up to post 4, above: "I had to delete a member from this group today for repeated violations of the following rule on the group home page: 'Posters who persist in raising issues that are outside the scope of the subject matter of this group will also be removed from the group.' The poster kept posting the same comment (about his alleged personal religious revelation) despite my warnings that it was far off topic and that I would invoke this rule if he persisted. I have also deleted both his comments and my responses about this matter."
Post 8 (November 14, 2017): "Before members post comments in this group, they should familiarize themselves with the rules set forth on this group's home page."
Post 14 (June 4, 2018): "As I have previously stated, posts that are not relevant to the subject matter (political philosophy and ethics, as expanded a little bit by some historical topics that I have previously approved) of this group do not belong in this forum. They may belong in other groups addressing other subjects but not here. Going forward, I will delete irrelevant posts without notice to the poster. As stated in the rules, posters who persist in making irrelevant comments will be removed from the group. I have had to remove at least one group member due to persistent postings of the same irrelevant comment." (Emphasis added.)
Post 15 (June 4, 2018):
I thought I had made myself sufficiently clear regarding this Goodreads group's relevancy rule, but I keep having to delete posts and topics and removing members who violate that rule.
This group is about political philosophy and ethics. It is not about religion except insofar as religion is directly related to political philosophy or ethics, e.g., the topic of separation of church and state. Our group members include people of many different religious faiths as well as atheists and agnostics. This is not the place for people to argue about theological issues. There are other groups, both within the Goodreads family and without, for such disputation. I refuse to let this group become a locus of religious wars. That was never my intent in founding it, and I will not permit it to happen. . . .
Henceforth, posts and topics that clearly violate the group rules will be deleted without prior notice. Group members who egregiously or persistently violate the rules will be permanently removed from the group. If you don't like the rules, you are free to withdraw from the group.
(Emphasis added.)
I will add the following at this time:
As I stated above, quoting an earlier post, "Since logic is, to my mind, relevant to both political philosophy and ethics, I have no problem with discussions of logic here. Basically, the test is whether a post relates to questions about human ethics and/or human government. If it does not, it belongs elsewhere. " (Emphasis added.)" When I referred to "logic," I meant logic that pertains to political philosophy or human ethics, not to mathematical or symbolic logic.
Alan E. Johnson
Moderator
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May I add to the topic covered in posts 21-29?Relative to the evolution of knowledge, is it not true today’s political philosophy or understanding is a function of observing governance under Montesquieu seems to perform better than those following Marx’s philosophy, and so on? As for ethics, the “Golden Rule” minus reciprocity (the eye-for-an-eye philosophy), appears to be a solid foundation.
On the other hand, appraising any philosopher without studying their written work “in true academic fashion,” then why study Aristotle where most of his work didn’t survive, and what did, was not intended for publication (Barnes, 1995, The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle)? From the wisdom of Cropsey, I would hate to think “with cruelest irony of all, what if vulgarized science should traduce” Aristotle “himself, obscuring his purposes and making his design the misconstrued object of interested approbation or ignorant calumny?”
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Relative to the evolution of knowledge, is it not true today’s political philosophy or understanding is a function of observing governance under Mont..."
Regarding your first paragraph, I am referring neither to Marx nor Montesquieu. Your questions, to the extent I understand them (they are confusingly garbled and ungrammatical), raise broad issues under the general rubric of "Political Philosophy and Ethics." There is no way I can give you a concise answer, and I would have to write a book to give you a better answer. With regard to ethics, see my forthcoming book provisionally entitled Reason and Human Ethics (to be published sometime during the 2020s). Although I have a vague notion of writing a later book on political philosophy, I don't know, given my advanced age, whether I will live that long (or be mentally competent that long). In the meantime, see my posts in this group. See also the works of Leo Strauss, though I disagree with Strauss on some matters.
Regarding your second paragraph: The language “in true academic fashion" is Feliks's language, not mine. I would never use this expression. There may have been a few minor scribal errors in the transmission of Aristotle's works. However, one finds considerable internal integrity when one examines the works themselves in depth. Even assuming, arguendo, that Aristotle himself did not write them, they are worth studying as a matter of philosophical inquiry.
Thanks Alan for your inspiring feedback. Please hurry with your “forthcoming book,” it seems society is moving with less reason and human ethics!
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Disturbing prospect: the rise of new on-line encyclopedias which will eschew citations in favor of weighting 'traffic' and 'hits'. An entry might be 'more true' than another entry, depending on how many clicks it has. Everything gussied-up with sexy-sounding marketing; terms like "Web-based IQ" etchttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everipedia
https://everipedia.org/
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One of the most common fallacies in political, legal, and sometimes academic argumentation is the straw person fallacy, f/k/a the straw man fallacy. A recent book describes this fallacy as follows:
[T]he straw man fallacy is committed by an arguer when he misrepresents his opponent’s position in order to refute it more easily by making it seem implausible, or weaker than it really is, and then argues against this set-up version. The straw man fallacy can involve exaggeration or misquotation, as well as other forms of distortion of an opponent’s position.Douglas Walton, Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach, 2nd ed., Kindle ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22.
In a 2000 book on ethics that I am currently in the process of substantially revising, I described this fallacy as a subset of the fallacy of diversion:
The fallacy of diversion is one of the most cherished mental tricks of lawyers and professors. One of its most frequent manifestations is the “straw person” argument (formerly known as the “straw man” argument). This clever technique mischaracterizes another’s position on an issue and then refutes the mischaracterized position. In other words, it constructs a “straw person” and then knocks it down. This methodology is often a last-ditch resort when the argument cannot otherwise be refuted or discredited. It is used very often by attorneys in written briefs filed with courts on various legal and evidentiary issues. Instead of squarely responding to an opponent’s arguments in an earlier filed brief, the subsequent briefwriter will mischaracterize the position of the opponent and then refute a position the other never took. Another form of diversion is to ignore the other’s argument and, instead, focus on irrelevant points, usually with a heavy emotional emphasis.Alan E. Johnson, First Philosophy and Human Ethics: A Rational Inquiry (Pittsburgh: Philosophia, 2000), 49-50.
I wrote the foregoing more than a decade before my retirement as a civil litigation lawyer. At that time, I saw the straw person fallacy being committed on almost a daily basis by litigation lawyers and judges (I never knowingly employed it myself). Today, I mostly see its use in the political arena. During the last few weeks, for example, I have observed especially heavy utilization of this fallacy by politicians, columnists, and other purveyors of political opinion. The form it has recently taken is to take a certain extreme position of a small minority associated with a political position and incorrectly attribute it to the principal advocates of that position as a substitute for engagement with the actual arguments of those advocates. In order to avoid entanglement in current political controversies, I won't recite concrete details here. Suffice it to say that the astute reader can easily spot its use in media reports of political statements.
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I am currently reading Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter by Terrence W. Deacon, who is a professor of biological anthropology and neuroscience and the chair of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. I started by reading Chapter 5 ("Emergence") and then circled back to the beginning in order to read the entire work in order. Deacon's scientific and philosophical analysis is quite fascinating and, indeed, revolutionary, though there are other scholars who also have been working somewhat along this line of thought. I thought I would share here a passage I read yesterday, as it bears directly on what I have been saying about the fallacy of faulty analogy:
The metaphor of the world as an immense machine full of smaller machines is, however, deeply infected with the special assumptions associated with human artifact design. When Richard Dawkins caricatures evolution as a Blind Watchmaker, [note omitted] he still characterizes organisms as machines, and machines are assembled to do something for some end by some external process. Though we typically think of organisms as analogous to engineered artifacts performing some designed task, this analogy can set up quite misleading expectations. Design of engineered artifacts is a function of imposed order that derives from outside. The integration of parts in a machine results from the careful selection of materials, shaping of parts, and systematic assembly, all of which occur with respect to an anticipated set of physical behaviors and ends to be achieved. Although living processes have components that are at least as precisely integrated in their function as any man-made machine, little else makes them like anything engineered. Whole organisms do not result from bringing together disparate parts but by their parts’ differentiating from one another. Organisms are not built or assembled; they grow by the multiplication of cells, a process of division and differentiation from prior, less differentiated precursors. Both in development and in phylogeny, wholes precede parts, integration is intrinsic, and design occurs spontaneously. The machine metaphor is a misleading oversimplification.Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, Kindle ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 36-37.
The tacit importation of a human artifact view of the world, with its implicit design logic, into a materialist metaphysics that restricts the introduction of anything like final causal relationships, creates the logical necessity of a telos ex machina universe, where design and purpose can only be imposed from the outside. In such a world, we appear as accidental robots blindly running randomly generated programs. But there is an implicit contradiction in this conception, though it is not due to the exclusion of absential properties as much as to the limitations of the machine metaphor. Machines are simplifications of the causal world. Abstractly conceived, a machine is finite, and all its features and future states are fully describable. They are essentially closed off from all physical variations except those that are consistent with a given externally determined function. Thus the whole notion of machine causality is predicated on a conception of causality that both excludes teleology from consideration and yet assumes it as the basis for distinguishing machines from generic mechanical interactions. The machine metaphor of the world implicitly begs for a watchmaker, even as it denies his or her existence.
That's some finely-honed prose, in #215. I'd want to remark further but I feel my commentary only has bearing on the constructal law debate ...so I won't embark on anything here lest this thread get derailed.
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Yes, questions regarding the validity of analogous reasoning long antedate the issue of alleged constructal law analogues. My purpose in discussing the fallacy in this thread is to adumbrate its general nature. Let's keep remarks about the constructal law in the thread reserved for that purpose.
Alan wrote: "Addendum to posts 211-12, supra: ...Design of engineered artifacts is a function of imposed order that derives from outside. ...
The machine metaphor of the world implicitly begs for a watchmaker, even as it denies his or her existence...."
There’s an “imposed order that derives from outside” of any living organism found throughout the universe known as the physical laws of nature (the “watchmaker”). These are the laws that “design” life via evolution (constructal law).
It would be interesting to find what Professor Deacon’s views are on the topic of evolution.
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You'll have to read his book. Evolution is one of the biggest topics in it, but I've only read so far a relatively small portion of this lengthy work.
Again, let's keep discussion of constructal analogues in the constructal theory topic. As I've repeatedly stated, I don't want every topic in this group hijacked into a discussion of constructal analogues. I will delete any further such discussions outside the constructal theory topic.
Alan wrote: "... Yes, questions regarding the validity of analogous reasoning..."Language as an analogy in the natural sciences:
http://www.lcfi.ulg.ac.be/laszlo/lang...
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I've been refreshing myself on basic differences between 'deductive', 'inductive', and 'abductive' reasoning this morning. As well as 'inference' and 'explanation'.Alan E., do these bedrock principles of logic hold direct sway in actual legal cases or are they sidestepped in favor of (any) more 'practical' forms of reasoning? Are there any more pragmatic forms of reason in daily life than these?
For instance, if a lawyer prepares what he thinks is a strong case but it (his case) really depends on an inductive argument vs his opponent who has built a case on deductive argument; will the case really be winnable for the opponent on this basis alone?
In other words, is the perceived difference between these argumentative formats, strong enough to actually decide legal cases?
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Alan E., do these bedrock princ..."
Legal cases never explicitly discuss technical categories of logic. Legal arguments can be analyzed in terms of logic, though never in the courtroom (this would go way over the heads of the jurors) and rarely, if ever, in legal briefs addressed to judges. Additionally, there is no opposition between inductive and deductive logic: they apply in different circumstances. For example, the major premise of a deductive syllogism is arrived at through inductive reasoning and evidence. Such issues are argued implicitly (replacing the nomenclature of logic with the actual arguments on which the nomenclature is based) but not explicitly. There are many books that have been written on argumentation (loosely, "informal" logic), of which legal argumentation is a subset. Those books expand on the categories of informal logic, including discussions of logical fallacies. It perhaps all started with Aristotle's Rhetoric and On Sophistical Refutations.
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Yes, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw a romantic-nationalist revolt against Enlightenment rationality. Among other things, this manifested itself in mid-twentieth-century fascism and is currently manifesting itself in analogous alt-right movements in the United States and Europe. The Enlightenment was not correct on all issues (the belief in inevitable progress being the most obvious), but it still stood for reason. As Leo Strauss observed, however, the Enlightenment version of reason departed from the classical version (Plato, Aristotle, et al.) of reason in some ways. This is a very long story about which much has been written.
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Is reason always desirable?
For example, suppose researchers find in..."
I don't understand your point here. Perhaps you could elaborate.
I think pragmatism might be relevant here"The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907: 42)
‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course. (1907: 106)
Other formulations fill this out by giving a central role to experience:
Ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our experience. (1907: 34)
Any idea upon which we can ride …; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true instrumentally. (1907: 34)
This might be taken to suggest that beliefs are made true by the fact that they enable us to make accurate predictions of the future run of experience, but other passages suggest that the ‘goodness of belief’ can take other forms. James assures us that it can contribute to the truth of a theological proposition that it has ‘a value for concrete life’ (1907: 40); and this can occur because the idea of God possesses a majesty which can ‘yield religious comfort to a most respectable class of minds’ (1907: 40). This suggests that a belief can be made true by the fact that holding it contributes to our happiness and fulfilment.
The kind of passages just noted may lend support to Bertrand Russell's famous objection that James is committed to the truth of ‘Santa Claus exists’ (Russell 1949: 772). This is unfair; at best, James is committed to the claim that the happiness that belief in Santa Claus provides is truth-relevant. James could say that the belief was ‘good for so much’ but it would only be ‘wholly true’ if it did not ‘clash with other vital benefits’. It is easy to see that, unless it is somehow insulated from the broader effects of acting upon it, belief in Santa Claus could lead to a host of experiential surprises and disappointments."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pr...
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"The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons. (1907: 42)
‘The true’, to ..."
I haven't studied pragmatism sufficiently to be able to comment in any detail on their perspective. However, for the reasons I have explained in this topic and elsewhere, I think the abandonment of reason has led and will lead to disaster. So there's a consequentialist argument! We are seeing the results of this abandonment on a daily basis.
Post #231 concludes, "But isn't their being wrong justified by the cost for them to be otherwise?"What is "the cost"? In the hypothetical posed in #231, it is discovered that humans are not causing global warming, so what would be the "cost" of skyrocketing "fossil fuel usage"?
If fossil fuel usage causes no problems, wouldn't it be "rational" not to worry about it?
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These are long and difficult questions. I am totally unfamiliar with "fictionalism" (as described) and accordingly will not address that notion except to say that, on the surface, it seems to me to be another manifestation of postmodernism, which (to the limited extent I have considered it) seems objectionable to me on many levels.
#241 addressed the question of "useful fictions," which reminded me of the "noble lie" in Plato's Republic. See the last paragraph of the present comment.
I agree that "everything or almost everything must be rationally considered." But the first problem is that people disagree about what "rationality" or "reason" means. I hold that reason means, first of all, logical thinking—both inductive and deductive (what Aristotle called "syllogistic"). But there again "logic" means different things to different people. For more than a century, academicians have mainly considered logic to be formal symbolic logic such as is used in computer languages. What I mean by "logic" is now often called "informal logic," which includes rational inductive and deductive thinking in ordinary human circumstances. Informal logic, as I understand it, is especially concerned with the importance of avoiding fallacious thinking in philosophical, political, and personal matters.
There is a long tradition going back at least to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments that ethics is informed by some kind of empathy, as distinguished from reason. Although I have not yet read more than a few pages of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, I plan to read the entirety of it in my course of study leading to my forthcoming book provisionally entitled Reason and Human Ethics. Smith's philosophical idea has been supported by numerous evolutionary studies that show that the higher animals have some sort of empathy and that this is part of the human evolutionary heritage. I will also discuss these studies in my book. I will probably take the position that, although true, empathy only goes so far. Reason, properly understood, must be the final judge. Moreover, empathy only addresses ethics between individual human beings. Ethics actually has two components: (1) ethics regarding oneself, and (2) ethics between and among individuals. Both kinds of ethics are, in my view, subject to rational analysis. By "rational" and "reason" I do not, as do many modern scholars, mean only rationality regarding means. I also mean approaching the question of ends in a rational manner. This is another difficult question that I have not yet worked out in detail but which I will address in my book.
Is reason always good for human beings? Can there be too much reason? I would say not, unless reason is defined narrowly in terms of means only and not ends. However, Spinoza and many other philosophers (including, by the way, Plato and Aristotle) thought that most people cannot be entirely rational, especially on the subject of religion. Today's militant atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al.) disagree and point to the dangers of irrational religion. It is perhaps true that the masses (what Plato and Aristotle called the hoi polloi) could not countenance strictly rational metaphysics (consider, for example, Aristophanes's The Clouds and Plato's Apology of Socrates). As I understand it, however, people in some Western European countries are generally not religious and are doing just fine. I am currently agnostic about this question. Perhaps I'll formulate my answer by the time I finish writing my book.
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Reason may break down at the outer limits of metaphysics and physics (see posts 1, 4, 6, 9, 11, 13, and 14 in the present topic). But this forum is concerned with ethical and political philosophy. I don't know how one would poke holes in the application of reason to ethics and politics unless one is prepared to argue for a "noble lie" to persuade the masses.
If you want to critique reason, the place to begin is with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant registers the beginning of modern philosophy's efforts to come to terms with science.There used to be something called "natural philosophy" but that disappeared as parts of it separated to become sciences seemingly independent of philosophy. Science became the place to go to find out about the truth of the universe. What, then, was left for philosophy to do?
Kant's argument, in a nutshell, is that when reason tries to operate independently of sensory experience ("pure reason") it can go astray (see the antinomies of pure reason that you can find in the table of contents of any edition the Critique of Pure Reason). Reason is important but it must be checked by sensory experience, a la science, which requires empirical confirmation of hypotheses in experiment or in some other form.
The exception for Kant is "practical reason," that is, ethics, where pure reason can legislate transcendently against nature (bodily appetite, sensory experience, etc.).
There is contemporary push-back against Kant's argument in the Critique of Pure Reason. In After Finitude (2006), Quentin Meillassoux argues that Kant, by arguing that philosophical reason should not go beyond sensory experience, left philosophy with nothing to say to dispute crackpot thinking, religion, etc. that purports to find truths beyond sensory experience.
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There used to ..."
Thanks, Bob, for your excellent summary. I have always had great difficulty understanding Kant, perhaps because his way of thinking appears to be so foreign to my own. I plan to revisit his writings before I finish my forthcoming book on ethics.
Alan, thanks.I should add two points to my final paragraph in #245. I'll add them at the Kant discussion thread.
In post #248, Dulnath Jayasighe asks, "Was Kant's work completely independent of the context in which he wrote them( Eg: Newtonian physics,Euclidean geometry)?""completely independent"? What I think I said was the opposite.
A few comments--
Science (a la Newton) was powerful but it was also threatening insofar as it posed the possibility of explaining everything, including human beings, in mechanistic, deterministic terms (variants of this threat remain to this day). The romantic period (late 1700s, early 1800s) was in part a response to this. It responded by elevating the subjective realm.
This elevation was a heyday for literature, especially poetry. The poet's imagination, more than anything else, appeared immune to any mechanistic explanation. The Romantic period is one of the great periods in English literature.
Kant lived most of his life before this period got going but he did live through its early stages, and I think it is fair to link his work with the romantic period. His Critique of Practical Reason in particular is an affirmation of human autonomy. His Critique of Pure Reason is an epistemology not a metaphysics, that is, an account of how humans know that focuses on human faculties (subjective realm). He also added a Critique of Judgment that focuses on aesthetics and is a link between the other two critiques.
In his push-back, Meillassoux sees Kant as an exemplar of the "correlationism" that Meillassoux rejects: "the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant seems to be that of correlation. By `correlation' we mean the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other" (After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, London: Continuum, 2008, p. 5). Meillassoux is part of a group of young philosophers that seek to return to something akin to metaphysics.
An amusing and unusual example of "evidence" was described by the writer Brad Meltzer on Book TV's In Depth program this past Sunday (12/2).This "evidence" was sought by Harry Houdini, the escape artist. Whenever a friend of his was nearing death, Houdini would give the friend a code word. That way, whenever Houdini encountered someone who claimed to be able to facilitate a conversation between Houdini and one of his dead friends, Houdini would ask for the code word to provide "evidence" that it really was his dead friend.
Evidently, no such "evidence" ever materialized.
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This "evidence" was sought by Harry Houdini, the escape..."
Great critical thinking!
According to Popper's falsification principle, a claim is scientific if and only if it possible to construct a way to falsify it. The stronger the claim, the harder it is to falsify it. The claim stands as long as it is "king of the hill."Houdini constructed a way to falsify a claim that the dead can speak to the living. But one wonders if that is enough to say this claim is scientific. Can a claim be scientific even if it never passes a falsification test?
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From Stanford U. Two papers on public perception, jurisprudence, institutionalized psychologies, and news media.
https://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/...
Some interesting statistics and citations of other papers arranged in such a way as to give an overview reaching back to some of the earliest studies; rather than contemporary reports which are always too-hotly debated and suspicioned.
Robert wrote: "According to Popper's falsification principle, a claim is scientific if and only if it possible to construct a way to falsify it. The stronger the claim, the harder it is to falsify it. The claim s..."I wonder if it wouldn’t be more correct to say that Popper’s principle is that a statement that is not capable of falsification is not a statement of scientific discourse?
Alan wrote: "In a review of Elkhonen Goldberg's The New Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World, I have once again discussed the fallacy of faulty analogy."It turns out that in the practice of modern scientific method, faulty analogy has been observed and reported on for the prevalence in which it occurs. It's apparently a well-known and somewhat troubling aspect of science in that it diverts from what scientists tend to claim their method is (aka, Reason). The flip side of this however, is that their style of analogy nevertheless still oftentimes leads to fresh discoveries even though it follows no logic.
Works: Hesse (1966), Black (1961), Mulkay (1974), Edge (1966), Leatherdale (1974). Cited in Latour & Woolgar's "Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts". A fabulous book in the tradition of Kuhn which I'm really enjoying lately.
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Thanks, Feliks. I didn't realize that others were aware of this problem. I have put the Latour book on my "to read" list.
Brad wrote: "Robert wrote: "According to Popper's falsification principle, a claim is scientific if and only if it possible to construct a way to falsify it. The stronger the claim, the harder it is to falsify ..."Brad, what is the difference between your statement in #256 and my "if and only if" statement in #252?
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Political Philosophy and Ethics
Books mentioned in this topic
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 4: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms (other topics)Mythical Thought (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (other topics)
Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (other topics)
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 1: Language (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Arthur Koestler (other topics)Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (other topics)
Edward R. Tufte (other topics)
Richard Saul Wurman (other topics)
