>>> jkschw at hotmail.com 12/07/00 08:26PM >>>
>
>CB: Hey, sort of like a warrant needs probable cause to believe ? Justin ,
>what do you make of all the jurisprudential analogies in science and
>philosophy of science ?
I haven't given the jurisprudential analogies serious thought. There was a thread some years back on one of these lists by someone who purported to have done so. Maybe it was on LBO, check the archives.
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CB: So you don't think your discussion of warrant as defined as probable cause to believe derives from philosophers of science analogizing to the legal ideas such as a warrant needing probable cause to believe a crime has been committed in the U.S. fourth amendment ? Just a coincidence in terminology ? I don't think so. Science and philosophy of science uses jurisprudential concepts in too many critical areas for it to be insignificant. What would science be without its "laws" ? Who do you think had the term first ?
>
>Could you elaborate on "It derives from the relations between the
>warranting beliefs that we hops ( hope ?) make the truth of the warranted
>belief more probable" ?
>
The basic idea is very simple: the reasons we have to believe things are other reasons, beliefs all the way back: thus, I believe in atoms because scientists believe in them; I believe that scientists are the right people to ask about what the world is made of, etc.; if you ask the scientists, they will point to a lot of experiments interpreted by other scientists, e.g., Einstein's graet paper on Brownian motion (proving that there are atoms). Of course atoms aren't beliefs, but the reasons we have to believe in atoms are all beliefs.
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CB: In legal terms, there is a lot of hearsay involved in most people's certitudes, including scientists'. This is another dimension in which scientific proof is socially constructed, based on faith and trust in other people, the division of labor. No one person can be a direct witness of all the experiments and empirical observations.
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Now, to believe something to believe that it is true, so the reason we give raesons to believe things is to enhance the likelihood that the belief we seek to support is true. To give a reason is to argue that a proposition should be accepted because the reason makes it more likely (even certain) that the proposition is true. That is what makes it a reason.
This is controversial: some argue that reasons just enhance the likelihopod that we will be able to predict and control events, that that and not truth is all we care about. But I think otherwise, in part because it seems quite mysterious to me how we could predict and control events on the basis of our beliefs if there was no truth for them to be true of.
This account is based on the epistemology of Wilfrid Sellars, a great pragmatic realist who was influenced, among other things, by Engels.
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CB: Engels has quite a bit to say on epistemology, truth , etc. For Engels, the truth of knowledge is tested by social practice ( experimentation and industry), by turning things-in-themselves into things-for-us ( the "us" being a social element), to know something is to know how to make it.