It can manifest instead as a wariness about putting weight down on one’s own causal models, as opposed to others’.
It can manifest as wariness about having high confidence in anything , including things that aren’t causal models.
If we were fully rational (and fully honest), then we would always eventually reach consensus on questions of fact.
No, because we are not all in the same page about what constitutes evidence. Aumann assumes that out of the way.
They suggested that we all treat ourselves as having a black box receiver (our brain) which produces a signal (opinions), and treat other people as having other black boxes producing other signals. And we all received our black boxes at random—from an anthropic perspective of some kind, where we think we have an equal chance of being any observer. So we can’t start out by believing that our signal is likely to be more accurate than average.
Yes, we do all have basic presuppositions that tend to vary, and it’s difficult to find something even more basic to justify them.
Oh, but any crackpot could say that their personal epistemology is better because it’s based on a bunch of stuff that they think is cool. What makes you different?”
Some aspects of epistemology, such as predictive ability, are directly testable , and others, such as correspondence to reality, aren’t.
Prediction is Insufficient for Correspondence.
Ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate. For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles … although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, since epicycles don’t exist.
A further way is to notice that ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities. -- one can’t assume one is incrementally approaching a realistic model just on the basis that a series of models has incrementally improving predictive power.Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can’t rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Since we don’t know how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology, even probablistic reasoning can’t tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that predictively better theories are more probably correct than worse ones, but we don’t really know whether current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God’s eye point of view.
Moreover, we can’t safely assume we are making steady, incremental progress towards the ultimately accurate ontological picture for just the reason already given—slight change in predictive accuracy going from one theory to another can be accompanied by major changes in ontology
This is a serious question for modest epistemology! It seems to me that on the signal-receiver interpretation you have to believe in God
Going by my definition of modest epistemology , you don’t have to kowtow to the general population or authorities. Not are you forbidden to. It isn’t a kind of epistemology, it’s a conclusion about how confident you , or anyone, can be. Since it applies to everyone, it puts a ceiling in how good experts can be, in absolute terms.
I think that’s my true rejection, in the following sense: If I saw a sensible formal epistemology underlying modesty and I saw people who advocated modesty going on to outperform myself and others, accomplishing great deeds through the strength of their diffidence, then, indeed, I would start paying very serious attention to modesty.
Modest epistemology doesn’t have to be justified by usefulness, it can be justified by truth.
Again, there are many areas where you just can’t tell how right you are, because you are not dealing with observations and predictions.
: “Those who dream do not know they dream, but when you are awake, you know you are awake.”
Having certainty in a few areas isn’t enough to tip the balance in favour of immodesty.
The modest haven’t formalized their epistemology very much,
Of course they have: most mainstream epistemologist are modest, and many have formalised their systems.
It can manifest as wariness about having high confidence in anything , including things that aren’t causal models.
No, because we are not all in the same page about what constitutes evidence. Aumann assumes that out of the way.
Yes, we do all have basic presuppositions that tend to vary, and it’s difficult to find something even more basic to justify them.
Some aspects of epistemology, such as predictive ability, are directly testable , and others, such as correspondence to reality, aren’t.
Prediction is Insufficient for Correspondence.
Ontologically wrong theories can be very accurate. For instance, the Ptolemaic system can be made as accurate as you want for generating predictions, by adding extra epicycles … although it is false, in the sense of lacking ontological accuracy, since epicycles don’t exist.
A further way is to notice that ontological revolutions can make merely modest changes to predictive abilities. -- one can’t assume one is incrementally approaching a realistic model just on the basis that a series of models has incrementally improving predictive power.Relativity inverted the absolute space and time of Newtonian physics, but its predictions were so close that subtle experiments were required to distinguish the two, and so close that Newtonian physics is acceptable for many purposes. Moreover, we can’t rule out a further revolution, replacing current scientific ontology.
Since we don’t know how close we are to the ultimately accurate ontology, even probablistic reasoning can’t tell us how likely our theories are in absolute terms. We only know that predictively better theories are more probably correct than worse ones, but we don’t really know whether current theories are 90% correct or 10% correct, from a God’s eye point of view.
Moreover, we can’t safely assume we are making steady, incremental progress towards the ultimately accurate ontological picture for just the reason already given—slight change in predictive accuracy going from one theory to another can be accompanied by major changes in ontology
Going by my definition of modest epistemology , you don’t have to kowtow to the general population or authorities. Not are you forbidden to. It isn’t a kind of epistemology, it’s a conclusion about how confident you , or anyone, can be. Since it applies to everyone, it puts a ceiling in how good experts can be, in absolute terms.
Modest epistemology doesn’t have to be justified by usefulness, it can be justified by truth.
Again, there are many areas where you just can’t tell how right you are, because you are not dealing with observations and predictions.
Having certainty in a few areas isn’t enough to tip the balance in favour of immodesty.
Of course they have: most mainstream epistemologist are modest, and many have formalised their systems.