It seems like you still need some criterion through which to criticize your beliefs. Popper offers the criterion that “your past observations don’t falsify your theory”, and “your theory minimizes adhocness”, but by which criterion can you accept those criterion as true or useful?
Right! This is the slippery part about the problem of the criterion: literally any way you try to address it requires knowing something, specifically knowing the way you try to address it. It’s in this way that nearly every response to it could be argued to be a special case of particularism, since if nothing else you are claiming to know something about how to respond to the problem itself!
Bartley is very explicit that you stop claiming to “know” the right way. “This is my current best understanding. These are the reasons it seems to work well for distinguishing good beliefs from unhelpful ones. When I use these approaches to evaluate the current proposal, I find them to be lacking in the following way.”
If you want to argue that I’m using an inferior method, you can appeal to authority or cite scientific studies, or bully me, and I evaluate your argument. No faith, no commitment, no knowledge.
This comment describes a response that sounds exactly like pragmatism to me, so I’m not sure what the distinction you’re trying to make here is.
Also, as Matt already pointed out, you must have some criterion by which you criticize your beliefs else you literally could not make any distinction whatsoever, so then the problem just becomes one of addressing how to ground that, perhaps by accepting it on faith.
Trying to anticipate where the confusion between us is, it might help to say that taking something on faith need not mean it remain fixed forever. You can make some initial assumption to get started and then change your mind about it later (that’s fundamental to coherentist approaches).
It seems like you still need some criterion through which to criticize your beliefs. Popper offers the criterion that “your past observations don’t falsify your theory”, and “your theory minimizes adhocness”, but by which criterion can you accept those criterion as true or useful?
Right! This is the slippery part about the problem of the criterion: literally any way you try to address it requires knowing something, specifically knowing the way you try to address it. It’s in this way that nearly every response to it could be argued to be a special case of particularism, since if nothing else you are claiming to know something about how to respond to the problem itself!
Bartley is very explicit that you stop claiming to “know” the right way. “This is my current best understanding. These are the reasons it seems to work well for distinguishing good beliefs from unhelpful ones. When I use these approaches to evaluate the current proposal, I find them to be lacking in the following way.”
If you want to argue that I’m using an inferior method, you can appeal to authority or cite scientific studies, or bully me, and I evaluate your argument. No faith, no commitment, no knowledge.
This comment describes a response that sounds exactly like pragmatism to me, so I’m not sure what the distinction you’re trying to make here is.
Also, as Matt already pointed out, you must have some criterion by which you criticize your beliefs else you literally could not make any distinction whatsoever, so then the problem just becomes one of addressing how to ground that, perhaps by accepting it on faith.
Trying to anticipate where the confusion between us is, it might help to say that taking something on faith need not mean it remain fixed forever. You can make some initial assumption to get started and then change your mind about it later (that’s fundamental to coherentist approaches).