Can you recommend an overview of everything wrong with probabilistic epistemology? I haven’t found one. There’s lots of papers that say “this particular objection is fatal, so why don’t you guys stop pretending,” but maybe no compendium of those?
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The real defense of probabilism is “where’s your alternative?” There’s no answer, if an alternative is required to be a fixed, guaranteed way of gaining knowledge mechanically without understanding what is going on.
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I’d say probabilism is basically a cognitive gamble that allows humans and machines to pretend to think until they’re caught out. Poetically appropriate. “Correlation is not causation” is less a warning than the ignored CYA-TOS you click through to use probabilism.
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Surely, some synthesis of those 20 defects is possible. It's not as if they're random (*wink*). Rather, there's a fundamental problem of modeling of which the 20 defects are manifestations. But still, it would be hard work to achieve this synthesis in a compelling manner.
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Yes! I do think that many are variations on a theme, and people keep discovering new versions and publishing them without recognizing that. So, yes, a catalog would also be a valuable step toward a synthesis.
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Hmm I’d say crippling but not fatal. Probabilism works well enough, in enough situations that it’s not wrong enough to fix until something big goes wrong. It’s mathematized superstition in a way, since by construction it stops short of including a causation metaphysics
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Probabilistic *methods* can work very well, *if* you understand the domain well enough to spply them effectively. By “probabilism” I mean the claim that the framework is universally applicable.
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