I think you’re arguing up the entirely wrong tree. Normality is what you’ve seen before: your history of previous observations. Egan’s law is that any new theory must predict what you’ve already seen. Einsteinian mechanics must predict roughly Newtonian behavior, otherwise it’s already falsified!
I think you’re arguing up the entirely wrong tree. Normality is what you’ve seen before: your history of previous observations. Egan’s law is that any new theory must predict what you’ve already seen.
On this construal, Egan’s law seems straightforwardly false. I have many times observed a stick bending and enlarging in a glass of water. But a true theory is going to deny this observation. In other words, I may have just been wrong about what I’ve seen before. My observations may just be false.
Your version of Egan’s law seems to me to entail that all observations are true. Does that sound right to you, or have I misunderstood?
You have made certain observations, but the assertion that the stick changed location and grew is mediated by your theory. Theory A says the stick grew, Theory B makes noises about illusions caused by refraction. Theory C says you did not see a stick, and is rejected on that basis. If for no other reason, you should consider preferring theory B over A because B makes better predictions than A.
In general, detangling observation from theory is a hard problem in philosophy of science. But that doesn’t justify throwing away belief in external reality.
Exactly. Your observations are observations; to reify them any further, that a ‘stick’ must have been ‘bent’ when it entered the ‘water’, is to enter in the area of theory where theories can be discarded or adapted. Theory C says not just something about what it means for a ‘stick’ to be ‘bent’, it denies that you observed what you observed, and can be rejected solely on that basis.
Let me ask you the same question I asked Tim then:
So what is the content of my observation? In the case of the bent stick, would you be willing to finish the sentence “I observed that...” such that this sentence cannot come up false on the basis of a new theory?
In the case of the bent stick, would you be willing to finish the sentence “I observed that...” such that this sentence cannot come up false on the basis of a new theory?
“I observed that my image of the stick shows the stick as bent.” It is not a statement of objective reality, but a statement of appearances to me, in my direct experience, that a new theory must not contradict. The new theory is allowed to say that my image of the stick does not accurately describe the stick, but it may not say that I didn’t observe the image.
The new theory is allowed to say that my image of the stick does not accurately describe the stick, but it may not say that I didn’t observe the image.
And would you agree that the only things that can be included in the ‘normality’ a theory must add up to are these kinds of images and appearing? In other words, would you agree that any statement of objective fact is always, however we want to put it, theory-laden or involving some kind of falsifiable explanation?
In other words, would you agree that any statement of objective fact is always, however we want to put it, theory-laden or involving some kind of falsifiable explanation?
Notice the word “statement” in the above. Perhaps communication of a fact requires the use of a theory; but this does not imply that the fact itself is somehow “theory-laden”. (Maybe the latter is also the case, but the former doesn’t imply it.)
Perhaps communication of a fact requires the use of a theory; but this does not imply that the fact itself is somehow “theory-laden”. (Maybe the latter is also the case, but the former doesn’t imply it.)
Well, the word ‘fact’ tends to refer ambiguously to two things: first to the apple’s being green, and second to the intensional, semantic object ‘the apple is green’. I intended the second meaning. These kinds of facts, I’m saying, have to get excluded from the ‘normal’. The other, former kind of fact have no place in any theory, since they’re just the way the world is. I do think the wiki article on the normality of reality is based on an equivocation between these two senses of ‘fact’.
Anyway, the question is whether or not facts of the intensional semantic sort could belong to ‘normality’. If not (so goes the line of reasoning) then the only thing we can include in normality are statements of appearance and seeming. But this, I think, makes Egan’s law trivial.
You have made certain observations, but the assertion that the stick changed location and grew is mediated by your theory.
So what is the content of my observation? In the case of the bent stick, would you be willing to finish the sentence “I observed that...” such that this sentence cannot come up false on the basis of a new theory?
But that doesn’t justify throwing away belief in external reality.
I believe, more strongly than most in this community, that it is essentially impossible to draw a clear line between observation and theory. But the important issue is deciding what theories are worth paying attention to, not figuring what observations to attend to.
I believe, more strongly than most in this community, that it is essentially impossible to draw a clear line between observation and theory. But the important issue is deciding what theories are worth paying attention to, not figuring what observations to attend to.
This seems to me to entail a rejection of Egan’s law, but I should qualify that. It doesn’t reject the rule of thumb that a good theory preserves the phenomena (though it may overturn them too). As a heuristic about choosing between theoretical explanations, this is quite sensible.
But the thing I’m objecting to is the a priori claim that a true theory preserves observations. This originally came up in the context of an argument about free will in MWI. Egan’s law was there used as an argument for the claim that MWI is compatible with free will, and I’m objecting to the validity of any such argument (note that I’m not claiming that MWI and free will are incompatibile, just that this isn’t a good argument for their compatibility). In short, if theories may well overturn observations (since they cannot be entirely extricated from theory), then nothing prevents a true theory from overturning something like free will. It may have simply appeared to us that we have free will, in the way it merely appeared to me that the stick was bent.
In short, if Egan’s law is ‘All other things being equal, prefer the theory which preserves the phenomena’ then fine. But then Egan’s law can’t be used to argue that a given theory actually does preserve a given phenomenon.
I suspect whoever used free will as a component in an argument about MWI was somewhat confused. (I made that particular mistake personally, so I probably have a pretty good idea of exactly how.)
I suspect whoever used free will as a component in an argument about MWI was somewhat confused.
I used it, and was confused. I think something fundamental to ethics (maybe free will?) is incompatible with modal realism, and was considering the thought that it’s incompatible for the same reasons with the kind of realism concerning the mathematics of non-relativistic quantum mechanics which produces the MWI. I didn’t make any real headway, but quite a few people said that MWI couldn’t in principle conflict with the possibility of free will because of Egan’s law. I’m here objecting that any interpretation of Egan’s law on which this is a valid argument must be false.
Might I recommend reading some more philosophy of science? Particularly Kuhn (Structures of Scientific Revolutions), Feyerabend, and responses to them.
My impression is that “preserve the phenomena” is trying to preserve physical realism from the Kuhn-type arguments about how fundamental objects like epicycles and impetus were abandoned as science progressed. It is not an argument at all about how to choose scientific theories. In short, I think you are applying the principle at the wrong philosophical meta-level.
Might I recommend reading some more philosophy of science? Particularly Kuhn (Structures of Scientific Revolutions), Feyerabend, and responses to them.
I appreciate that. I’m student of philosophy, and I’ve spent some years with that material, though it’s not my area of speciality or anything. But to be clear, I’m not trying to apply or endorse a principle like egan’s law or ‘preserve the phenomena’. I’m just trying to figure out what ‘adding up to normality’ is supposed to mean. My impression so far is that it unless it’s a statement of the iterative nature of theoretical activity, then it involves a commitment to a foundationalist theory of empiricism.
But a true theory is going to deny this observation.
No. A true theory better explain (away) this observation. That’s what Egan’s law said. You seem to have interpreted Egan’s law as saying that theories must actually be true. While that’s probably a good principle, it’s not exactly what’s meant.
I would describe the point of Egan’s law as being that no matter how counterintuitive a theory may be in areas outside of our own experience, it better line up in some way with our intuitions in cases we have experienced. No matter how counter-intuitive gravitational lensing may seem, relativity still better give a reason for why, when I measured the position of a falling object over time in my high school physics class, I measured it accelerating towards the ground at about 9.8 m/s^2.
I would describe the point of Egan’s law as being that no matter how counterintuitive a theory may be in areas outside of our own experience, it better line up in some way with our intuitions in cases we have experienced.
JGWeissman made a similar argument, and I asked him whether or not he would agree to this: no statement of objective fact is within the sphere of the ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ (which a theory must preserve or add up to) refers only to appearances, seemings, images, and things describe only my experiences, and never any fact about the world.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but yeah, in the context under discussion I’d agree with this. Somehow knowing what’s really happening, as opposed to what I experience and infer, is not a normal event. If I am under the impression that I know what’s really happening based on theory A, and then later I discard theory A in favor of theory B, there is no requirement that theory B’s account of what’s really happening preserve what I consider my pre-existing knowledge.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but yeah, in the context under discussion I’d agree with this. Somehow knowing what’s really happening, as opposed to what I experience and infer, is not a normal event.
Hmm, I didn’t expect anyone to bite this bullet. I think I’m happy with this conclusion insofar as it gets us a rejection of Egan’s law as an argument that theory A preserves phenonmenon X, where X isn’t a mere appearance (not that you thought otherwise).
The next step (if my karma can withstand it) on my part would be to argue that ‘appearing to be blue’ is logically posterior to ‘being blue’, such that if we arrived at a theory that said that ‘being blue’ was simply nonsense, we would have to throw out ‘appearing to be blue’ along with it. In other words, the dependence of ‘appearance’ style sentences on straightforward fact-stating sentences means that appearances are no less susceptible to attack. The idea would be to show that there’s no possible ‘normal’ that’s in principle immune to attack by a theory, even if there is a battery of everyday observations that aren’t likely to be attacked.
The next step (if my karma can withstand it) on my part would be to argue that ‘appearing to be blue’ is logically posterior to ‘being blue’,
Would one implication of this be that if an object simultaneously appears white to one observer and blue to another, it is both white and blue, even though nobody perceives it as both white and blue?
No, I think that would be a different sort of priority. My claim is that sentences of the form ‘A appears to be X’ are logically posterior to sentences of the form ‘A is X’. So if ‘A is X’ is in some particular case a category mistake or a bit of nonsense (not a mere physical impossibility) then ‘A appears to be X’ will come out nonsense as well. So for example, if it turns out that everyday physical objects don’t really have color (and that this is a category mistake or a bit of nonsense) then ‘appearing to have a color’ will also be nonsense. A clear cut case of such a category mistake would be the claim that ‘the number eight is green’. If this is simply nonsense, then it’s also nonsense to say that ‘the number eight appears green’. Whoever says this (synesthesiacs notwithstanding) is either confused about what a number is, or what a color is.
The concrete examples are helpful, thank you. Can we be equally concrete about what it means for a claim like “the number eight appears green” to be nonsense?
I mean, the number eight certainly doesn’t appear green to me. And when a synesthesiac reports that they experience the number eight as green, I don’t really have a clear sense of what experience they are describing… the closest I can come is imagining that whenever I think about the number eight, I perceive a color shift in my environment similar to putting a green gel on stage lights, which I’m pretty sure is not at all like what they experience.
So, how would I go about establishing whether their report is nonsense?
While I was looking this up, I learned that the sentence…
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
…is both grammatically valid, and not nonsense.
(nods) I’m aware of this sort of data, but it’s not in the least clear to me whether they qualify as evidence that such a report is or isn’t nonsense by Esar’s account, or on what basis they might do either.
I think you’re arguing up the entirely wrong tree. Normality is what you’ve seen before: your history of previous observations. Egan’s law is that any new theory must predict what you’ve already seen. Einsteinian mechanics must predict roughly Newtonian behavior, otherwise it’s already falsified!
On this construal, Egan’s law seems straightforwardly false. I have many times observed a stick bending and enlarging in a glass of water. But a true theory is going to deny this observation. In other words, I may have just been wrong about what I’ve seen before. My observations may just be false.
Your version of Egan’s law seems to me to entail that all observations are true. Does that sound right to you, or have I misunderstood?
You have made certain observations, but the assertion that the stick changed location and grew is mediated by your theory. Theory A says the stick grew, Theory B makes noises about illusions caused by refraction. Theory C says you did not see a stick, and is rejected on that basis. If for no other reason, you should consider preferring theory B over A because B makes better predictions than A.
In general, detangling observation from theory is a hard problem in philosophy of science. But that doesn’t justify throwing away belief in external reality.
Exactly. Your observations are observations; to reify them any further, that a ‘stick’ must have been ‘bent’ when it entered the ‘water’, is to enter in the area of theory where theories can be discarded or adapted. Theory C says not just something about what it means for a ‘stick’ to be ‘bent’, it denies that you observed what you observed, and can be rejected solely on that basis.
Let me ask you the same question I asked Tim then:
So what is the content of my observation? In the case of the bent stick, would you be willing to finish the sentence “I observed that...” such that this sentence cannot come up false on the basis of a new theory?
“I observed that my image of the stick shows the stick as bent.” It is not a statement of objective reality, but a statement of appearances to me, in my direct experience, that a new theory must not contradict. The new theory is allowed to say that my image of the stick does not accurately describe the stick, but it may not say that I didn’t observe the image.
And would you agree that the only things that can be included in the ‘normality’ a theory must add up to are these kinds of images and appearing? In other words, would you agree that any statement of objective fact is always, however we want to put it, theory-laden or involving some kind of falsifiable explanation?
Notice the word “statement” in the above. Perhaps communication of a fact requires the use of a theory; but this does not imply that the fact itself is somehow “theory-laden”. (Maybe the latter is also the case, but the former doesn’t imply it.)
Well, the word ‘fact’ tends to refer ambiguously to two things: first to the apple’s being green, and second to the intensional, semantic object ‘the apple is green’. I intended the second meaning. These kinds of facts, I’m saying, have to get excluded from the ‘normal’. The other, former kind of fact have no place in any theory, since they’re just the way the world is. I do think the wiki article on the normality of reality is based on an equivocation between these two senses of ‘fact’.
Anyway, the question is whether or not facts of the intensional semantic sort could belong to ‘normality’. If not (so goes the line of reasoning) then the only thing we can include in normality are statements of appearance and seeming. But this, I think, makes Egan’s law trivial.
So what is the content of my observation? In the case of the bent stick, would you be willing to finish the sentence “I observed that...” such that this sentence cannot come up false on the basis of a new theory?
Agreed, and that is not at all my intention here.
I believe, more strongly than most in this community, that it is essentially impossible to draw a clear line between observation and theory. But the important issue is deciding what theories are worth paying attention to, not figuring what observations to attend to.
This seems to me to entail a rejection of Egan’s law, but I should qualify that. It doesn’t reject the rule of thumb that a good theory preserves the phenomena (though it may overturn them too). As a heuristic about choosing between theoretical explanations, this is quite sensible.
But the thing I’m objecting to is the a priori claim that a true theory preserves observations. This originally came up in the context of an argument about free will in MWI. Egan’s law was there used as an argument for the claim that MWI is compatible with free will, and I’m objecting to the validity of any such argument (note that I’m not claiming that MWI and free will are incompatibile, just that this isn’t a good argument for their compatibility). In short, if theories may well overturn observations (since they cannot be entirely extricated from theory), then nothing prevents a true theory from overturning something like free will. It may have simply appeared to us that we have free will, in the way it merely appeared to me that the stick was bent.
In short, if Egan’s law is ‘All other things being equal, prefer the theory which preserves the phenomena’ then fine. But then Egan’s law can’t be used to argue that a given theory actually does preserve a given phenomenon.
I suspect whoever used free will as a component in an argument about MWI was somewhat confused. (I made that particular mistake personally, so I probably have a pretty good idea of exactly how.)
[Edit] This wasn’t a particularly helpful comment; I’ll refer you here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will
That seems likely. Free will used as a component of an argument for just about anything is confused.
I used it, and was confused. I think something fundamental to ethics (maybe free will?) is incompatible with modal realism, and was considering the thought that it’s incompatible for the same reasons with the kind of realism concerning the mathematics of non-relativistic quantum mechanics which produces the MWI. I didn’t make any real headway, but quite a few people said that MWI couldn’t in principle conflict with the possibility of free will because of Egan’s law. I’m here objecting that any interpretation of Egan’s law on which this is a valid argument must be false.
Might I recommend reading some more philosophy of science? Particularly Kuhn (Structures of Scientific Revolutions), Feyerabend, and responses to them.
My impression is that “preserve the phenomena” is trying to preserve physical realism from the Kuhn-type arguments about how fundamental objects like epicycles and impetus were abandoned as science progressed. It is not an argument at all about how to choose scientific theories. In short, I think you are applying the principle at the wrong philosophical meta-level.
I appreciate that. I’m student of philosophy, and I’ve spent some years with that material, though it’s not my area of speciality or anything. But to be clear, I’m not trying to apply or endorse a principle like egan’s law or ‘preserve the phenomena’. I’m just trying to figure out what ‘adding up to normality’ is supposed to mean. My impression so far is that it unless it’s a statement of the iterative nature of theoretical activity, then it involves a commitment to a foundationalist theory of empiricism.
No. A true theory better explain (away) this observation. That’s what Egan’s law said. You seem to have interpreted Egan’s law as saying that theories must actually be true. While that’s probably a good principle, it’s not exactly what’s meant.
I would describe the point of Egan’s law as being that no matter how counterintuitive a theory may be in areas outside of our own experience, it better line up in some way with our intuitions in cases we have experienced. No matter how counter-intuitive gravitational lensing may seem, relativity still better give a reason for why, when I measured the position of a falling object over time in my high school physics class, I measured it accelerating towards the ground at about 9.8 m/s^2.
JGWeissman made a similar argument, and I asked him whether or not he would agree to this: no statement of objective fact is within the sphere of the ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ (which a theory must preserve or add up to) refers only to appearances, seemings, images, and things describe only my experiences, and never any fact about the world.
Can’t speak for anyone else, but yeah, in the context under discussion I’d agree with this. Somehow knowing what’s really happening, as opposed to what I experience and infer, is not a normal event. If I am under the impression that I know what’s really happening based on theory A, and then later I discard theory A in favor of theory B, there is no requirement that theory B’s account of what’s really happening preserve what I consider my pre-existing knowledge.
Hmm, I didn’t expect anyone to bite this bullet. I think I’m happy with this conclusion insofar as it gets us a rejection of Egan’s law as an argument that theory A preserves phenonmenon X, where X isn’t a mere appearance (not that you thought otherwise).
The next step (if my karma can withstand it) on my part would be to argue that ‘appearing to be blue’ is logically posterior to ‘being blue’, such that if we arrived at a theory that said that ‘being blue’ was simply nonsense, we would have to throw out ‘appearing to be blue’ along with it. In other words, the dependence of ‘appearance’ style sentences on straightforward fact-stating sentences means that appearances are no less susceptible to attack. The idea would be to show that there’s no possible ‘normal’ that’s in principle immune to attack by a theory, even if there is a battery of everyday observations that aren’t likely to be attacked.
Would one implication of this be that if an object simultaneously appears white to one observer and blue to another, it is both white and blue, even though nobody perceives it as both white and blue?
No, I think that would be a different sort of priority. My claim is that sentences of the form ‘A appears to be X’ are logically posterior to sentences of the form ‘A is X’. So if ‘A is X’ is in some particular case a category mistake or a bit of nonsense (not a mere physical impossibility) then ‘A appears to be X’ will come out nonsense as well. So for example, if it turns out that everyday physical objects don’t really have color (and that this is a category mistake or a bit of nonsense) then ‘appearing to have a color’ will also be nonsense. A clear cut case of such a category mistake would be the claim that ‘the number eight is green’. If this is simply nonsense, then it’s also nonsense to say that ‘the number eight appears green’. Whoever says this (synesthesiacs notwithstanding) is either confused about what a number is, or what a color is.
The concrete examples are helpful, thank you.
Can we be equally concrete about what it means for a claim like “the number eight appears green” to be nonsense?
I mean, the number eight certainly doesn’t appear green to me. And when a synesthesiac reports that they experience the number eight as green, I don’t really have a clear sense of what experience they are describing… the closest I can come is imagining that whenever I think about the number eight, I perceive a color shift in my environment similar to putting a green gel on stage lights, which I’m pretty sure is not at all like what they experience.
So, how would I go about establishing whether their report is nonsense?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
This is what I have in mind.
While I was looking this up, I learned that the sentence… Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. …is both grammatically valid, and not nonsense.
Experiments verifying synesthesia.
(nods) I’m aware of this sort of data, but it’s not in the least clear to me whether they qualify as evidence that such a report is or isn’t nonsense by Esar’s account, or on what basis they might do either.