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).
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).