I've added an addendum that I hope will make things clearer.

I'm going to drop discussion about the universe in particular for now. Explaining why I think that the map-territory epistemology runs into problems there would require a lot of exposition on points I haven't made yet, so it's better suited for a post than a comment.

I've realised that there's a lot more inferential distance than I thought between some of the things I said in this post and the content of other posts on LW. I'm thinking of strategies to bridge that now.

That doesn't mean that it's helpful to just tell the positivists to pretend that map(universe) and universe are the same and the issue is solved.

Hm, if you're attributing that to me then I think I haven't been nearly clear enough.

Earlier I said that I had ontological considerations but didn't go into them in my post explicitly. I'll outline them for you now (although I'll be talking about them in a post in the near future, over the next couple days if I kick myself into gear properly).

In the end I'm not going to be picky about what different models claim to be real so long as they work, but in the epistemology I use to consider all of those models I'm only going to make reference to agents and their perceptual interfaces. If we consider maps and models as tools that we use to achieve goals, then we're using them to navigate/manipulate some aspect of our experience.

We understand by trial and error that we don't have direct control over our experiences. Often we model this lack of control by saying that there's a real state of affairs that we don't have perfect access to. Like I said, I think this model has limitations in areas we consider more abstract, like math, so I don't want this included in my epistemology. Reality is a tool I can use to simplify my thinking in some situations, not something I want getting in the way in every epistemological problem I encounter.

Likewise, in your autism example, we have a model of possible failure modes that empirical research can have. This is an extremely useful tool, and a good application of the map-territory distinction, but that example still doesn't compel me to use either of those tools in my epistemology. The more tools I commit myself to, the less stable my epistemology is. (Keeping reservationism in the back of your mind would be helpful here.)

Not among people who really follow the "the map is not the territory". There are many maps of the city of Berlin. I will use a different map when I want to navigate Berlin via the public transport system than when I want to drive via bike.

At the same time if my goal is staying remaining sane, it's useful to not forget that neither of those maps are the territory of the city of Berlin. In the case of the city of Berlin few people will make the mistake of confusing the two. In other domains people do get into issues because things get complicated and they forget that their maps aren't the territory.

In not sure whether you position is: "I don't like positivism, let's do something different" or "I don't like positivism, let's do X".

I don't think you need a "real Berlin" for that usage of maps to make sense: instead of saying that a transit map models some aspect of the real Berlin, we can say that the transit map is functional for navigating Berlin.

I'd rather this phrasing because having the concept of a real Berlin can lead to confusions when we apply the idea of by analogy to other things, like theories of arithmetic, the universe. or "the self." That's why I want it removed from our base epistemology. Of course I'll be very happy to use the map and territory epistemology as a heuristic if I find it easier to think with in certain situations, but because of its shortcomings elsewhere I will not claim that it is the correct epistemology.

Hopefully that brief explanation helps answer what I am trying to do to some extent. In any case I'm thankful for both the discussion (which I'd be happy to continue, of course) and the reading suggestion.

Do you think that some of that mysticism is a fruitful path that get's wrongly rejected?

No, but that's because I've seen it in action and noted that I don't have much use for it, and not because I've constructed an epistemology that proscribes it altogether.

I don't see the point of barring paths as inherently epistemically irrational. I would rather let anyone judge for themselves which tools would be appropriate or inappropriate, and model the success or failures in whichever way helps them choose tools more effectively later.

For example there's a commonly held belief that we shouldn't believe two mutually contradictory models since they can't both describe reality and at least one of them will lead us astray. In other words it isn't epistemically rational to believe both. I want to scrap judgements like that from the underpinnings of our epistemology, because that really does close fruitful paths. During revolutions in physics, after one theory gains a slight advantage the competitors all die out. I would like to see more of a plurality, so that we can have multiple tools in our arsenal with different potential uses. Rather than deciding that I can believe only one, I'll say that I can use any to the extent that they work, and I will hold beliefs about where and how I can apply them.

If I look at the public transportation map of Berlin then the distances between places aren't very accurate. The map isn't designed for that purpose. That doesn't make it a bad map and I can still mentally distinguish the territory of Berlin from the map.

You're right, of course, motivations vary. Transit maps are not trying to model distances, just the order of stops on various lines. But motivations in some areas, like logic and physics, are much more heavily influenced by the positivists than transit maps. I think we should be paying more attention to the specific uses we have in mind when constructing any model, including logics and theories of physics, whereas model-reality epistemologies make us think only of mirroring reality once we get to things considered more fundamental.

Of course some people are doing what I'm suggesting in "fundamental" areas. Constructivists in the foundations of math are constructing their foundations explicitly so that all math can be computable and subject to automated proof checking and theorem proving. Usually they don't fret about whether a constructive foundation will give us the real, true picture of math. Like I've said, I think we should adopt that mentality everywhere.

What do you mean with "coherent" concept inside pragmatism? In what sense does a pragmatist worry about whether or not something is coherent?

"Coherent" is a stand-in for some worries I have: Does having our epistemology underpinned by a model-reality relationship skew our motivations for creating models? Does it close certain fruitful paths by making us believe they are epistemically nonsensical or questionable? Does it have significant limitations in where it can be fruitfully applied and how? I think the answer to each is yes, which motivates me to get rid of the model-reality relationship from my core epistemology. Although of course I consider it perfectly legitimate to use that relationship as a heuristic in the context of a pragmatic background epistemology.

Why? What wrong with the word ontology? I think you get into problems if you want to do ontology but refuse to think of yourself as doing ontology.

It's not that I refuse. I just don't put much stock in the distinction between epistemology and ontology. I think they're entangled, and that pretending they aren't leads to confusion (see the p-zombie debate, for example).

I didn't really bring out the ontological elements of what I was doing in this post, and I recognised that afterward. I'll fix that oversight later.

In what aspect is your idea of pragmatism supposed to differ from general semantics with the slogan "The map is not the territory"?

I'm not requiring that "territory" be a coherent concept at all. Suppositions about territories are models that my epistemology evaluates rather than assumptions built into the epistemology.

That's a claim about ontology not a claim about epistemology. When it comes to modern source I consider Barry Smith worth reading. He's doing practical ontology for bioinformatical problems.

If you like, you can think of this as a an ontological critique of most epistemologies. I wouldn't like to phrase it that way, though.

A sentence's meaning is more like the odds ratio multipliers it provides for your priors than like a truth predication.

And what do you mean by this? That the old truth model is less correct than the probabilistic model, or that the probabilistic model performs better in applications? Or maybe you're prone to say that the latter is more correct, but what you mean by that is that there's more use for it. That's the tension I am trying to bring out, those two different interpretations of epistemic claims. And my claim is that the second gets us farther than the first. For instance it permits us to use combinations of tools that most epistemologies would frown upon, like contradictory theories.

There's a shift in perspective that has to happen in the course of this discussion, from evaluating the intuitive correctness and reality-correspondence (even probabilistically) of theories as sets of claims about the world to evaluating the potential uses and practical strength of theories as tools to accomplish our goals. I'm supporting my approach epistemology in the second more pragmatic way rather than the first way, which is more epistemic.

I think you greatly exaggerate your originality here.

I thought it might come across that way, but didn't want to invest a bunch of time listing my intellectual debts (the post is long enough already). For the record, I'm aware that my ideas aren't entirely original, and I suspect that when I think they are I would be able to find similar ideas in others' writing independently.

the fact that it has been around for quite a while without seeming to have radically triumphed over all rivals does provide some reason for doubt about the extent of its world-beating potential.

I think that part of the problem here is that pragmatists didn't spend nearly as much energy on the details of applying their ideas as, say, Carnap and Popper did. They also tended to keep their discussion of pragmatism to philosophical circles, rather than engaging with scientific circles about their research. There's a lot of inertia to fight in order to shift scientific paradigms and the pragmatists didn't engage in the social and political organisation necessary to do so.

I think I've provided a fair summary of some of the benefits of wearing a pragmatic thinking cap. And I'll be outlining those and others in more detail later.

I'm fine with agents being better at achieving their goals than I am, whether or not computational models of the brain succeed. We can model this phenomenon in several ways: algorithms, intelligence, resource availability, conditioning pressures, so on.

But "most correct" isn't something I feel comfortable applying as a blanket term across all models. If we're going to talk about the correctness (or maybe "accuracy," "efficiency," "utility," or whatever) of a model, I think we should use goals as a modulus. So we'd be talking about optimal models relative to this or that goal, and a most correct model would be a model that performs best relative to all goals. There isn't currently such a model, and even if we thought we had one it would only be best in the goals we applied it to. Under those circumstances there wouldn't be much reason to think that it would perform well under drastically different demands (i.e. that's something we should be very uncertain about).

I think you're exaggerating. The amount of references he makes to publications in philosophy, social science, science and history suggests he was aware of a big chunk of the literature relevant to his interests.

Still, I'm interested in hearing some criticisms in more detail. Where specifically does he rely on straw man arguments?