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.
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!