As I also noted below, I think you’re fine in terms of meeting posting standards. And I regularly make propositions while only having e.g. 70-80% certainty, sometimes as low as 40-50%. I find it’s a good way to find possible weak points in my argument.
So just to make sure I understand your argument now, is it essentially this?
“The current standards of the scientific community, while possibly imperfect, are good enough that most things that are accepted as legitimate research will be useful. However, if a researcher is uninterested in a topic, even if the topic is highly legitimate, they are unlikely to do a very good job, the end result being that their output will be mostly useless, no matter how well-conceived the original program was. Therefore, researchers should not force themselves to work on problems that are uninteresting.”
Let me know if the above is an accurate representation of your views. I believe that I myself agree with the above paragraph, but that this argument, while correct, does not alleviate the social responsibility of researchers to try to optimize the usefulness of their research programs (for reasons that I can explain if you do not think this is true).
Also, I just realized that I attributed the conclusion “researchers do not have a social responsibility to optimize the usefulness of their research programs” to your original argument, even though you gave no indication that this was intended. So I should apologize for that.
I think the main disagreement I have with your translation is that I don’t think that “normatively good research” is the same as “research that the scientific community approves of”. I believe that the standards of the scientific community can and should be criticized on rational grounds. I anticipate you might ask, given the above, on what is meant by “normatively good research” then, I guess I just mean that which corresponds with intellectual and epistemic virtue. My use of “normative” isn’t my own innovation though, it is the same sense in which logic is a normative science. Logic doesn’t describe how people actually think, but how people /should/ think; but this normativity shouldn’t be understood exclusively in moral terms. Normativity refers to how well does the subject matter, in this case thinking, relate to it’s end. Normatively good research, then, refers to research that best satisfies the purpose or goal of research.
I guess, to be fully clear, I should clarify on what the purpose or goal of research is. You could say that the goal is usefulness, in which case my proposition would be a tautology (“Research that is good at being useful is useful and research that is bad at being useful is not useful.”), but I don’t think that’s the answer. Maybe I’m being an idealist, but I think the primary purpose of research is to satisfy curiosity, without disregarding any other ulterior aims and purposes that actual researchers might have. I think curiosity is one of the few actual drives that people have that points to truth for it’s own sake, it represents a person’s “will to know”*.
Is what satisfies curiosity also useful? I think if my argument is wrong, this is where it is weak and potentially vulnerable. But I don’t think it is obviously wrong. Your concern seems to be that researchers have a responsibility to prefer research that is useful over research that isn’t useful, even if it doesn’t satisfy the researchers interest as much. But I doubt that it is that easy to determine whether research will be useful /a priori/. C.S. Peirce uses the example of conic sections being useful for Kepler’s astronomy, which in turn was useful for Newtonian physics. We’re talking about research that had been worked on for generations, and its hard to imagine any of these men “optimizing the usefulness of their research programs”. Yet it is hard to imagine work that has had a greater positive affect on our standard of living than these men.
I don’t mean to say that curiosity is the drive to learn about anything, we know that different people are interested in different things. But I think that whatever a person is interested in, curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied at learning false things. I don’t mean to imply that curiosity is satisfied at learning anything if it happens to be true.
So you believe that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently virtuous, and you endorse research on those grounds? I.e. research is good to the extent that it reveals truth, and bad to the extent that it reveals falsehoods?
Can you clarify if you also believe that usefulness should be a non-negligible factor in evaluating the virtuousness of a given piece of research (irrespective of other factors which might make it impossible to care about usefulness directly)?
Well, first, note that there is a difference between intellectual and moral virtue. When you say “inherently virtuous”, I have the awful feeling that you’re talking about “moral virtue”. I would say that “intellectual virtue” and “rationality” are near-synonyms, at least in the way that “rational” is used on this site. They both seem to me to be a sort of meta-cognition, where you are thinking about thinking, and you’re trying to determine what sort of thinking will best take you closer to a given end.
But I don’t think that usefulness is an aspect of the normative end of research. When research is useful, it just happens to be that way; in the same way that conic sections just happens to have ended up being a useful science, but if it was studied or not studied on the basis of expected utility, it probably would have been passed over. Generally, I agree with C.S. Peirce about the need to separate theory and practice. Practice can make use of theory, but trying to engage in both at the same introduces prejudices into the theory, and makes the practice more difficult than necessary.
Is this correct then? You believe that developing theory based on practical considerations will lead to bad theory, which in the long term will be bad even from a practical standpoint (because in 200 years we won’t have developed the theory we would have needed to in order to efficiently tackle the problems we will be facing in 200 years).
I’m still trying understand the standards of this site, while it’s not a bad thing, it will take me some time to get used to. Your question “Is this correct then?” I think is asking me how much certainty does my proposition deserve. While I believe it is true, mainly because I trust C.S. Peirce’s judgment, I think it fails as a proposition. To me, a proposition is a social thing, I’m not just reporting my own belief, but in a proposition I am suggesting that others reading the proposition /should/ also believe it, and that’s why propositions need to be justified. Given that, I should retract my proposition. On other sites the standard was to try out ideas to try to find out which ones are better, so this is different.
Oh I was actually just trying to understand your argument. By “Is this correct” I meant “Do I correctly understand your position”. In general what it means to be justified is fairly unclear, I think you have provided a fair amount of justification for your position, assuming I understand it correctly.
This is probably not typical, but whenever I look at an argument and think “that clearly makes no sense” (which was my reaction to your original post, for reasons already explained), my assumption is that I don’t understand your position correctly, and I then spend as much time as necessary to be certain that I understand your position before continuing the discussion.
Since I am fairly confident from your response that I now understand your position, I will note that I disagree with it. Based on this and other threads, though, your position is shared by plenty of other people on this site. So in the interests of time I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion of why I disagree right now, instead I’ll write up a short discussion post later that will reach a larger audience. I will note that your assertion is exactly what paulfchristiano is advocating testing: it seems that there is a large divide between people who think theory should be developed with practice in mind, and people who think theory should be developed in the way advocated by C.S. Peirce. Since this is such an important question, we should try to test this proposition; the fact that there has been little effort to test it so far means that (1) we should suspect ourselves of motivated stopping and (2) there is a large marginal benefit to performing the analysis.
Oh :) In that case, I think you’ve summed up my position well. I guess in my mind I have the idea of a researcher trying to “obey two masters rather than one”, that is utility and truth. It seems to me that being weighed down by utility concerns would cause someone to ignore certain perfectly rational possibilities because they aren’t productive.
Testing the proposition, I think, would be through a historical survey, don’t you think? I’ll see about summarizing C.S. Peirce’s thoughts on this matter for the site.
As I also noted below, I think you’re fine in terms of meeting posting standards. And I regularly make propositions while only having e.g. 70-80% certainty, sometimes as low as 40-50%. I find it’s a good way to find possible weak points in my argument.
So just to make sure I understand your argument now, is it essentially this?
“The current standards of the scientific community, while possibly imperfect, are good enough that most things that are accepted as legitimate research will be useful. However, if a researcher is uninterested in a topic, even if the topic is highly legitimate, they are unlikely to do a very good job, the end result being that their output will be mostly useless, no matter how well-conceived the original program was. Therefore, researchers should not force themselves to work on problems that are uninteresting.”
Let me know if the above is an accurate representation of your views. I believe that I myself agree with the above paragraph, but that this argument, while correct, does not alleviate the social responsibility of researchers to try to optimize the usefulness of their research programs (for reasons that I can explain if you do not think this is true).
Also, I just realized that I attributed the conclusion “researchers do not have a social responsibility to optimize the usefulness of their research programs” to your original argument, even though you gave no indication that this was intended. So I should apologize for that.
I think the main disagreement I have with your translation is that I don’t think that “normatively good research” is the same as “research that the scientific community approves of”. I believe that the standards of the scientific community can and should be criticized on rational grounds. I anticipate you might ask, given the above, on what is meant by “normatively good research” then, I guess I just mean that which corresponds with intellectual and epistemic virtue. My use of “normative” isn’t my own innovation though, it is the same sense in which logic is a normative science. Logic doesn’t describe how people actually think, but how people /should/ think; but this normativity shouldn’t be understood exclusively in moral terms. Normativity refers to how well does the subject matter, in this case thinking, relate to it’s end. Normatively good research, then, refers to research that best satisfies the purpose or goal of research.
I guess, to be fully clear, I should clarify on what the purpose or goal of research is. You could say that the goal is usefulness, in which case my proposition would be a tautology (“Research that is good at being useful is useful and research that is bad at being useful is not useful.”), but I don’t think that’s the answer. Maybe I’m being an idealist, but I think the primary purpose of research is to satisfy curiosity, without disregarding any other ulterior aims and purposes that actual researchers might have. I think curiosity is one of the few actual drives that people have that points to truth for it’s own sake, it represents a person’s “will to know”*.
Is what satisfies curiosity also useful? I think if my argument is wrong, this is where it is weak and potentially vulnerable. But I don’t think it is obviously wrong. Your concern seems to be that researchers have a responsibility to prefer research that is useful over research that isn’t useful, even if it doesn’t satisfy the researchers interest as much. But I doubt that it is that easy to determine whether research will be useful /a priori/. C.S. Peirce uses the example of conic sections being useful for Kepler’s astronomy, which in turn was useful for Newtonian physics. We’re talking about research that had been worked on for generations, and its hard to imagine any of these men “optimizing the usefulness of their research programs”. Yet it is hard to imagine work that has had a greater positive affect on our standard of living than these men.
I don’t mean to say that curiosity is the drive to learn about anything, we know that different people are interested in different things. But I think that whatever a person is interested in, curiosity wouldn’t be satisfied at learning false things. I don’t mean to imply that curiosity is satisfied at learning anything if it happens to be true.
So you believe that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently virtuous, and you endorse research on those grounds? I.e. research is good to the extent that it reveals truth, and bad to the extent that it reveals falsehoods?
Can you clarify if you also believe that usefulness should be a non-negligible factor in evaluating the virtuousness of a given piece of research (irrespective of other factors which might make it impossible to care about usefulness directly)?
Well, first, note that there is a difference between intellectual and moral virtue. When you say “inherently virtuous”, I have the awful feeling that you’re talking about “moral virtue”. I would say that “intellectual virtue” and “rationality” are near-synonyms, at least in the way that “rational” is used on this site. They both seem to me to be a sort of meta-cognition, where you are thinking about thinking, and you’re trying to determine what sort of thinking will best take you closer to a given end.
But I don’t think that usefulness is an aspect of the normative end of research. When research is useful, it just happens to be that way; in the same way that conic sections just happens to have ended up being a useful science, but if it was studied or not studied on the basis of expected utility, it probably would have been passed over. Generally, I agree with C.S. Peirce about the need to separate theory and practice. Practice can make use of theory, but trying to engage in both at the same introduces prejudices into the theory, and makes the practice more difficult than necessary.
Is this correct then? You believe that developing theory based on practical considerations will lead to bad theory, which in the long term will be bad even from a practical standpoint (because in 200 years we won’t have developed the theory we would have needed to in order to efficiently tackle the problems we will be facing in 200 years).
I’m still trying understand the standards of this site, while it’s not a bad thing, it will take me some time to get used to. Your question “Is this correct then?” I think is asking me how much certainty does my proposition deserve. While I believe it is true, mainly because I trust C.S. Peirce’s judgment, I think it fails as a proposition. To me, a proposition is a social thing, I’m not just reporting my own belief, but in a proposition I am suggesting that others reading the proposition /should/ also believe it, and that’s why propositions need to be justified. Given that, I should retract my proposition. On other sites the standard was to try out ideas to try to find out which ones are better, so this is different.
Oh I was actually just trying to understand your argument. By “Is this correct” I meant “Do I correctly understand your position”. In general what it means to be justified is fairly unclear, I think you have provided a fair amount of justification for your position, assuming I understand it correctly.
This is probably not typical, but whenever I look at an argument and think “that clearly makes no sense” (which was my reaction to your original post, for reasons already explained), my assumption is that I don’t understand your position correctly, and I then spend as much time as necessary to be certain that I understand your position before continuing the discussion.
Since I am fairly confident from your response that I now understand your position, I will note that I disagree with it. Based on this and other threads, though, your position is shared by plenty of other people on this site. So in the interests of time I’m not going to get into a lengthy discussion of why I disagree right now, instead I’ll write up a short discussion post later that will reach a larger audience. I will note that your assertion is exactly what paulfchristiano is advocating testing: it seems that there is a large divide between people who think theory should be developed with practice in mind, and people who think theory should be developed in the way advocated by C.S. Peirce. Since this is such an important question, we should try to test this proposition; the fact that there has been little effort to test it so far means that (1) we should suspect ourselves of motivated stopping and (2) there is a large marginal benefit to performing the analysis.
Oh :) In that case, I think you’ve summed up my position well. I guess in my mind I have the idea of a researcher trying to “obey two masters rather than one”, that is utility and truth. It seems to me that being weighed down by utility concerns would cause someone to ignore certain perfectly rational possibilities because they aren’t productive.
Testing the proposition, I think, would be through a historical survey, don’t you think? I’ll see about summarizing C.S. Peirce’s thoughts on this matter for the site.
I think that would be really interesting!