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From: flink@mimsy.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Knowledge and the Academics
Message-ID: <6790@mimsy.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 26-May-87 22:59:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: mimsy.6790
Posted: Tue May 26 22:59:15 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 28-May-87 06:04:29 EDT
References: <669@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU> <667@gargoyle.UChicago.EDU>
Reply-To: flink@mimsy.UUCP (Paul V Torek)
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Organization: U of Maryland, Dept. of Computer Science, Coll. Pk., MD 20742
Lines: 42
Summary: Historical evidence of _what_, and why is that _evidence_?

obnoxio@brahms.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) writes:
>Look in the history books.  Kenn's own reasoning was that "induction
>works".  And he *can* justify it--by induction.

I don't dispute that part; I was doubting Kenn's claim "that the only 
adequate basis for knowledge is the repeatable testing that characterizes 
the hard sciences," to quote Richard Carnes's reply to Kenn.  In order to
support that claim with historical evidence, one would presumably have to
show that other (alleged) bases for knowlege had consistently failed.  The 
only clearcut way to do that would be to show that _each_ of those other 
bases had produced (largely or wholly) _false_ results.

But in order to do that, one would have to decide questions which are
(arguably) not the sort which are amenable to the sort of testing practiced
in the hard sciences.  That, I thought, was Carnes's point, and I agreed
with it.

>[...]  But Kenn's point was you won't even find "mere agreement"
>in the social sciences, except of the most general kind.

So what?  Unless mere disagreement weighs more heavily against a proposition
than mere agreement weighs in favor -- which I don't find particularly
plausible -- that doesn't suffice to support Kenn's claim.

>Regress--or perhaps Loeb's theorem.  No one has adequately formalized
>induction--some believe it impossible--but the idea of solving Hume's
>problem by self-reference, as opposed to infinite regress, is attrac-
>tive.

Ah, well, I didn't know that the discussion I was joining was so concerned
about induction.  And I'm not very familiar with Loeb's theorem, so I won't 
comment here, or on the issue of "self-referential bootstrapping".

>And while I'm at it, what's wrong with infinite regress anyway?  Some-
>times philosophers seem scared off by infinity the way physicists were
>from black holes for decades.

Well, if one holds that infinite regresses are justifying in general, then
one can justify anything.  (There's a simple proof of this, but I can't
remember it offhand; I'll dig it up upon request.)
--
Paul Torek					flink@mimsy.umd.edu