Notes

I think that philosophy in general has problems with falsifiability. Philosophers rarely if ever argue on each other's terms, or concede their opponents' premises. What would even happen if philosophers specified the evidence it would take to dissuade them? It reminds me of my empirical theory of ethics. If someone could produce a cogent argument that hypocrisy was viable, I would be dissuaded. When Robert Wright did this in The Moral Animal, I was dissuaded — and admittedly dismayed. How would falsifiability work with the idea that ethics were subjective or objective? I think that most people think that at least to some degree ethics is subjective. So to hard-core realists, I ask you, what evidence would it take to convince you that you were wrong? I have to be an anti-realist, although I don't think I'm a very hard-line one. I think that ethics inheres in subjects, but I don't think that that makes it arbitrary. But a realist can rightly ask me, what evidenc

What evidence would it take to convince you that you were wrong? This was a question that I Googled. This is a good website I found in the results, and this is a good article in it, with a good principle. “It is irrational to hold any view so tightly that you aren’t willing to admit the possibility that you might be wrong.” “The rational response is to actually engage contrary information and truly consider whether or not your view is correct.” The principle that you must be able to answer this question is the principle of falsifiability . This reasoning is of relevance to the problem of induction . According to the principle of falsifiability, inductive scepticism is inherently irrational. An inductive sceptic can accept nothing as evidence that she is wrong. She cannot accept a deductive argument because induction is by definition not deductively valid. She cannot accept anything that occurred in the past because it might change in the future. She cannot accept anything that is o

Got an idea yesterday afternoon for an approach to philosophy that I call "constructive scepticism". On my incredibly long train trips to and from work I wrote about three thousand words about it. By that time I had said everything I had wanted to say about it. That usually means that nothing more happens with it, because I have simply decided that I don't have enough to contribute to the subject. But in this case it seems different enough to me that I will post a link to it, right here .