Endless Descent

I've been too tied up in entertainment to post much lately. Found a joint with a fine mix of odd cats with a great range of notions. Been a long time for that and I've been in sore need to knock the rust off. Odd bit about that was coming across an argument rustier than I am. It's been years back from when I was still Agnostic that I last saw it trotted out. It used to be a common argument no matter how terrible it was but perhaps it's gaining favor again. Sadly comment threads are no place to do it justice at all from either side.

I've written before about the hollow place Agnosticism leaves one in the endless descent for Truth™. I'm a bit too lazy at the moment to dig up old links for those, so you'll either remember them or not. The gist of it is all simple enough to do without the excess color commentary however. Roughly put we can't know anything that we don't know. And what we know is only by the rolling around inside our own head. And we know the brain is a crafty bastard that is well capable of lying to itself. So the result is that we can know nothing with assurety at all. Truth™ can be no more firm then our own slippery ability to make ourselves self-smug about what we're not sure we've ever seen or heard.

If it's the first time you've heard those notions then be assured that there's nothing unusual about it, since I'm entirely sure that I know that the Sophists hit on it back in the day from the various dribblings I'm entirely certain I read about their writings. It's a total reduction of the universe to Truth™ that only exists as the truth we can know by our own lenses.

Or roughly: For every Truth™ we're certain of there's a truth more basic that explains it or confounds it. We can then forever dig without hitting either it or China.

And this is all well, True™, and beyond question by all right-thinking folks. Save those that take it seriously and note that truth can never be known. Not even the statement that there's Truth™ in the Truth™ being impossible to find or state. (Though I can't remember for the life of me which Greek school it was for that. But Greek it was by my own lenses.)

That's the backstory in short, and certainly easier than digging through the archives. And that, my friend, is the truth.

Now, the rusty argument with teeth knocked off the blade is known as the Duhem-Quine Thesis and it goes halfway to this truth while stating that it's completely untrue in the same breath that it proclaims the True™ Truth™ of unattainable Truth™. That'll make all sorts of sense in a minute.

The Duhum-Quine Thesis takes as given the Agnostic worldview I just spooled out and then asks what science can do in the face of this horrible contradiction: That science provides Truth™ that cannot be known to be True™.

Let's start with the basics. Quine has less chops then Russell but takes rhetoric to a more rarified artform. Both of them are breasted tits that are unique for their proficiency in sound-bites and utter immunity from rationality. (Which has no rational basis anyways. True™) What Quine does to warrant adding his name to the notion is to expand it to logic and mathematics. And a good deal of salesmanship.

Duhem is the man of interest here. His claim is that of Agnosticism: That there is an endless descent into nonsense and that the truth cannot be otherwise known. Fares so far as it is. His solution is then to state that no knowledge can be gained, and no theories can be falsified, save those that have been. And if you're wondering just how we can falsify anything when we cannot falsify anything? Then you're right up there dictating the modern morass of science that Karl Popper went on about wrongly.

Duhem's line is roughly this: When we have a theory we are implicitly folding in axioms unstated from other disciplines or from assumption. Futher, that when we are performing an experiment we are testing all the above as well as all the above that applies to the theories that led to the creation of the instruments we are using for measurement. And so if a prediction fails under inspection we know something is false. But we cannot say whether it is our theory of Cosmology or our of Telescopes.

This is all perfectly correct under Vituperative Agnosticism such as I had a history of professing. As well as a number of people that are respectable and who spanned some two and a half millenia of thought on the problem.

Duhem's solution is only compounds the fundamental problem you might already notice. His solution was to state that we cannot throw out the theory we are measuring as we are also measuring the theories of the instruments themselves. Further, that while we may have two contradictory theories, that we cannot throw out either since our Telescope is more akin to a Horoscope. And thus both theories must stand. Quine, back to him, simply stated that we should keep believing what we believed despite that there's nothing that can be believed, because the Hubble is the progeny of the Prince of the World and cannot be trusted.

Which, under purity, is correct. If we can know nothing then we can know nothing. But if we can know nothing then we cannot know the agreement with the hypotheses we meant to test and the Truth™ either. "Induction is terribly wrong and for this we cannot know the falsehood of things. But via induction? I'm right, Biatches!"

There's no cogent manner to make this work unless we're cherry-picking the results that confirm us. More properly, Duhem and Quine are simply trying to excuse the injection of superstition into experimentation. Walk the line of things we cannot know now or ever and suss it out.

If it's impossible for us to distinguish between a failed theory we're testing and a failed instrument we're using then it's likewise impossible for us to distinguish between a successful theory we're testing and a failed instrument we're using. Every theory is then all of true, false, coherent, and unfalsifiable; all at the same time. Which is even deeper nonsense than putting on rhetorical sideshows in the Colleseum.

This is all True™ however.

But with which there is, and can be no notion of science at all. It's simply not rational (Which has no rational basis anyways.) We're all descended of monkeys created by Darwin via a mechanism invented by God while he sat on an infinite stack of turtles contemplating reincarnation into a caterpillar with 8 arms for the purpose of flogging Scandanavian boatmen with the skin of a horse.

Or, perhaps, you could take a lead from common sense and Bronze-Age Mediterranean pederasts and Violent Agnostics and note that if your instruments aren't proven then you're not testing the theory you're purporting to test at all.

You're testing the instruments.

To stop the Endless Descent you have to stop somewhere. The Truth™ doesn't matter a whit as long as you get on about trying to make an accurate model for the things you can't know described in a language that came from nowhere that's spoken by people that don't exist. But to state anything we have to stop and make a claim first about what measurements we can't know we're making before we accept the coherence of a theory we are prohibited from measuring.