Normal

"It is advantagous for the human race to attempt to protect human life."

Clutch

Advantageous with respect to what? What's the advantage you claim humans derive from protecting human life across the board?

And once you explain it, won't we thereby acquire a criterion of testability?

Normal

It's clear you want me to reveal some kind of subjective basis for the advantage, the worth, or the value, but I maintain that the standard is objective, IOW: it exists outside of an individual's perceptions.

So, I'll try to re-word it again:

It is advantagous to the purpose of human life that human life try to protect other human life.

Clutch

Look, if you want to try and bullshit your way out of this, I'm willing to be bloody-minded and help you embarrass yourself. A little bit of history, then:
Right. You started talking about what can be "derived" from the Cogito, and when that turned out to be a mistake, you changed topics altogether.

If you can't keep track of what you've just said, why should I expect you to keep track of what I've said?

Honestly, what is so repugnant about the following replies?

"I don't know."

"My knowledge about this is a bit sketchy; would you mind filling me in?"

"These are hard and subtle questions, and I don't have a settled view."

"I'll have to go away and think about that for a while."

I mean, is there some hidden payoff to being caught bullshitting, that I just can't see?

For what it's worth, I think the connections between meaning, testability and verification are very puzzling indeed. If I thought I had hard and fast answers, I'd give them to you now. All I know is that you haven't given any real argument to support your claim that Sagan's dictum is wrong.

Clutch

Certainly I knew in advance that you (like everyone else) would find it difficult to clearly define these notions without reference to subjectivity. But them's the facts -- it's nothing of my doing.
Okay. But you've added a huge assumption here. Now you have the definite description "the purpose of human life" embedded in your definition. This would normally be understood to say, then, something like:

"There exists exactly one thing that is human life's purpose, and it is to that thing's advantage for human's to protect human life."

What is this one thing that is the purpose of human life? You seem now to be defining the obscure in terms of the more obscure.

Normal

Why are you extrapolating what I'm saying instead of actually reading it?

I'm not talking about the attribute of existence, ie. "I exist" being the same as "Caesar exists", I'm talking about all truth YOU can come to know, ie. the subjective truths you discover, are based on sensory perceptions and those are from your existence.

Here, I'll try to explain. Someone who lacks the 5 senses can still know he is alive. With each addition of a sense to this person, he can come to know more. Existence (being alive) is still the first necessary condition for knowledge. How can you argue that?

Then, through the combination of existing and the senses, all other truths can be discovered, thus giving way to the "predictive" nature of "I think therefore I am".

Hey, I'll be the first one to admit "I don't know", but you are misrepresenting my arguments.

Normal

Seeing as how my argument hinges on the fact that the "purpose" is objective, and thus exists outside of an individuals perceptions, it follows it exists outside my perceptions as well, so I don't know what you want me to say.

I'll try to think of a less controversial objective truth.

bd-from-kg

[Sorry, duplicated an old post by accident.]

bd-from-kg

Clutch:

Sorry for the delay. The trip to the pool (with kids) turned into an all-day visit. And answering your post satisfactorily turned out to be more complicated than expected. But here goes.

As I commented earlier, it’s not entirely clear just what Sagan was saying here. Let’s take the first interpretation, that he was referring to truly untestable claims – i.e., claims for which no observation whatsoever would count as evidence for or against. In that case he’s clearly correct: such claims are veridically worthless. Such claims by definition cannot “issue in predictions” of any kind. (If they did they’d be testable.) They would also have no explanatory value because, even if they appeared to “explain” or help explain (even in part) some phenomenon, they would have “explained” any other outcome just as satisfactorily. In other words, such claims are equally compatible with any possible outcome or observation; otherwise, once again, they would be testable, at least to some extent. Thus we don’t have to “see how many examples can be produced of untestable claims having genuine explanatory or predictive utility”; we already know how many there will be: zero.

The other interpretation yields a more interesting question along these lines. Suppose that Sagan was referring to a claim that one couldn’t test at the time, although it’s testable in principle. In other words, consider claims for which there is presently no evidence (or none that we have access to) for or against. On this interpretation Sagan is saying that it is irrational to accept such claims.

You suggest that this is itself a claim subject to empirical verification. But there’s a problem with this, because it’s a guideline for evaluating empirical claims, and trying to evaluate these guidelines empirically leads unavoidably to a circle. To see this, let’s call the conjunction of all such principles Eval. That is, Eval is a complete set of guidelines for evaluating all empirical claims, specifying the conditions under which it is rational to accept them. Is Eval itself subject to empirical verification? How can it be? Let’s take any set of tests and observations and consider whether they rationally justify acceptance of Eval. How are we to go about deciding this? Well, it would seem that the only possible answer is to use the guidelines encoded in Eval. But this presupposes that Eval is valid.

To put it another way, the criteria for evaluating empirical claims cannot itself be evaluated as an empirical claim (without circularity). Indeed, it doesn’t make sense that such criteria be “world-dependent”, because until one knows how to evaluate empirical claims one has no way of determining anything whatsoever about the world.

On the other hand we have to consider your objection, which I’d prefer to put slightly differently. First, instead of talking about research programs that “help themselves to untestable claims in crucial explanatory roles” we can just talk about programs that base predictions on hypotheses for which there is no evidence for or against (call them HNE programs, or HNE’s for short) And instead of supposing that these programs are known to consistently produce false predictions, let’s imagine a possible world in which they are known to consistently produce true ones. Wouldn’t this falsify the principle? And doesn’t this show that the principle is testable after all?

Let’s look at this idea more carefully. Take one of these programs (call it RP-1) and design a closely related one (call it RP-1N) which is identical to RP-1 except that it adds a final step: it negates each claim produced by RP-1. Now if the HNE’s that RP-1 used to produce a given claim were truly “crucial”, for each prediction made by RP-1 there must be at least one such that, if RP-1 had assumed its negation instead, it would have made the opposite prediction. So RP-1N, like RP-1, is a research program which produces predictions based on HNE’s, but unlike RP-1 the predictions it produces are consistently false.

So the most that can be true in any possible world is that there may be a class of research programs that use HNE’s in crucial explanatory roles and which consistently yield true predictions. Call this class HNE-T.

But recall that we began by assuming that there was a class of HNE’s that not only did produce true predictions, but were known to do so. (This assumption was necessary, since otherwise their existence could not be evidence against our principle.) But how can we determine which HNE programs are in the class HNE-T? Well, it seems to me that the only possible way is to operate them long enough to identify (to the desired confidence level) the ones that consistently produce true predictions. Thus we must suppose that RP-1 (for example) has been identified as an HPE-T program in this way.

But now we have contradicted the original assumption, because the fact that RP-1 has been found to reliably produce true predictions is evidence for the hypotheses that it uses, which were supposed to have no evidence for or against them! So RP-1 is not in fact an HPE-T program after all. It’s a research program that uses hypotheses that were untested when it was set up, but its very success means that they are no longer untested. Or in other words, by the time we are in a position to know that it was an HPE-T program, it no longer is an HPE-T program.

So we see that in reality the scenario that we imagined originally, in which research programs based on untested hypotheses yet yielding consistently true predictions provided evidence against our principle, is actually impossible. This shows that there cannot, as a matter of logic, be evidence against the principle. And if there is no such thing as possible evidence against it, there cannot be evidence for it either. In other words, it is not subject to empirical verification or falsification.

Thus Sagan’s hypothesis is correct (but untestable) on the second interpretation as well.

Clutch

bd, thanks for your comments.Why conjunction? Surely disjunction, if anything. (Why suppose that every claim must be evaluable by every "principle"? So long as it's evaluable by some principle it is a fortiori evaluable.)

Moreover, why assume that the set of such guidelines is completable?If Eval's a disjunction, what you say no longer applies. Any one disjunct may be evaluable by some other disjunct. As soon as one passes muster, the whole disjunction passes.

Anyhow. In one sense, the circularity you discuss is not a problem. What makes something a "principle" in the sense I think you mean, is whether it tends to select theories that, in some rough but intuitive sense, work. The notion of a theory's working -- it seems obvious to me -- is a world-involving one, cashed out in terms of successes and failures in prediction, explanation, consilience and so forth.

Now, we ask, what about the principles themselves? Are they empirical? My answer is Yes, since it is a similarly empirical matter whether the application of a given principle tends to select for theories that work.

And that's not a circularity. We are not in this case justifying the principle by appeal to itself. We are just holding the theory to its own standard to see whether it can be consistently applied to itself. This is true even if we consider the norm that science should work (in the sense hand-waved at above) -- does that norm work? Answer: well, let's look at the world and see! Let's look at the history of intellectual practice that has governed itself by that norm, and ask whether governance by that norm has worked.

Now, maybe what you have in mind is something different: asking not whether use of a principle is evaluable by the lights of the principle itself, but rather, what justifies treating such a principle as a good one. So ultimately we'd get a principle like "Principles that work are good", and then justify this by observing that this principle works and hence is good.

But this is an entirely different question from the one in consideration. Sagan is not trying to justify doing science! He's justifying a particular way of doing it, assuming that you want to. We must distinguish between:

(A) If we want to believe theories that work, should we incorporate untestable claims into our intellectual projects?

and

(B) Should we want to believe theories that work?

Perhaps you hold, along with many other very smart folks, that there can be no empirical answer to questions like (B). I don't know, myself. But the important thing is that all the "principles" in question are, plausibly, like (A) -- they will take the form of hypothetical imperatives, since they are surely not meant to engage anyone whose aim, at least, isn't to believe the predictive and explanatory over the misleading and unfecund.

The relevant self-testing form of (A), then, will just distinguish between notions of working appropriate to our level of metalanguage: 'w1orks', say, will apply to 1st-order theories, while 'w2orks' will apply to 2nd-order theories about 1st-order theories. (Sagan's dictum is, or can be massaged into, one of the latter.) Then the self-testing form of (A) will be:

(A') If we want to believe 1st-order theories that w1ork, should we believe 2nd-order theories that w2ork?

And (A') is obviously answerable, one way or the other, on the basis of empirical evidence.

This is conjectural and inelegant, for which I apologize, but I think it's what I think.