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TimFreeman comments on Pancritical Rationalism Can Apply to Preferences and Behavior - Less Wrong
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I’d first like to congratulate you on a much more reasonable presentation of Popperian ideas than the recent trolling.
What about beliefs being justified by non-beliefs? If you're a traditional foundationalist, you think everything is ultimately grounded in sense-experience, about which we cannot reasonably doubt.
Also, what about externalism? This is one of the major elements of modern epistemology, as a response to such skeptical arguments.
I don't mean to imply that either of these is correct, but it seems that if one is going to attempt to use disjunctive syllogism to argue for anti-justificationism, you ought to be sure you've partitioned the space of reasonable theories.
This example seems anomalous. If there exists some H such that, if P(H) > 0.9, you lose the ability to choose P(H), you might want to postpone believing in it for prudent reasons. But these don’t really bear on what the epistemically rational level of belief is (Assuming remaining epistemically rational is not part of formal epistemic rationality).
Furthermore, if you adopted a policy of never raising P(H) above 0.9, it’d be just like you were stuck with P(H) < 0.9 !
It seems that there is a big difference between the two cases. We can criticize beliefs because we have a standard by which to measure them – reality, in the same way that we can criticize maps if they’re not very accurate representations of the territory. But it’s not at all clear that we have anything analogous with preferences. True, you could criticize my short term preference of going to lecturers as ineffective towards my long-term goal of getting my degree, but there doesn’t seem to be any canonical metric by which to criticize deep, foundational preferences.
One of the most important aspects of our epistemology with regards factual beliefs is that the set of beliefs a computationally unlimited agent should believe is uniquely determined by the evidence it has witnesses. However, this doesn’t seem to be the case with preferences: if I have a single long term, there’s no proof it should be {live a long time} rather than {die soon}. Without a constraining external metric, there are many consistent sets, and the only criticism you can ultimately bring to bear is one of inconsistency.
If a traditional foundationalist believes that beliefs are justified by sense-experience, he's a justificationalist. The argument in the OP works. How can he justify the belief that beliefs are justified by sense-experience without first assuming his conclusion?
I had to look it up. It is apparently the position that the mind is a result of both what is going on inside the subject and outside the subject. Some of them seem to be concerned about what beliefs mean, and others seem to carefully avoid using the word "belief". In the OP I was more interested in whether the beliefs accurately predict sensory experience. So far as I can tell, externalism says we don't have a mind that can be considered as a separate object, so we don't know things, so I expect it to have little to say about how we know what we know. Can you explain why you brought it up?
I don't see any way to be sure of that. Maybe some teenage boy sitting alone in his bedroom in Iowa figured out something new half an hour ago; I would have no way to know. Given the text above, do think there are alternatives that are not covered?
The point is that if a belief will prevent you from considering alternatives, that is a true and relevant statement about the belief that you should know when choosing whether to adopt it. The point is not that you shouldn't adopt it. Bayes' rule is probably one of those beliefs, for example.
I presently believe there are many consistent sets of preferences, and maybe you do too. If that's true, we should find a way to live with it, and the OP is proposing such a way.
I don't know what the word "ultimately" means there. If I leave it out, your statement is obviously false -- I listed a bunch of criticisms of preferences in the OP. What did you mean?
Wrong Externalism
The two examples I gave are well known and well studied theories, held by large numbers of philosophers. Indeed, more philosophers accept Externalism than any other theory of justification. Any essay that argues for a position on the basis of the failure of some alternatives, without considering the most popular alternatives, is going to be unconvincing. If you were a biologist, presenting a new theory of evolution, you would be forgiven for not comparing it to Intelligent Design; however, omitting to compare it to NeoDarwinism would be a totally different issue. All you've done is present two straw man theories, and make pancriticial rationalism look good in comparison.
That all the criticisms you listed can be reduced to criticisms of inconsistency – generally by appending the phrase ‘and you prefer this not to happen’ to them.
I don't know what exactly "justify" is supposed to mean, but I'll interpret it as "show to be useful for helping me win." In that case, it's simply that certain types of sense-experience seem to have been a reliable guide for my actions in the past, for helping me win. That's all.
To think of it in terms of assumptions and conclusions is to stay in the world of true/false or justified/unjustified, where we can only go in circles because we are putting the cart before the horse. The verbal concepts of "true" and "justified" probably originated as a way to help people win, not as ends to be pursued for their own sake. But since they were almost always correlated with winning, they became ends pursued for their own sake - essential ones! In the end, if you dissolve "truth" it just ends up meaning something like "seemingly reliable guidepost for my actions."
If he believes belief are only justified by experience, that could a problem. Otherwise, he could use reductio, analysis, abduction, all sort of things.