David Chapman

Related: I’m still trying to think through the implications of this tweet from @hardscihttps://twitter.com/hardsci/status/1069755156336599040 …

I can immediately see doing some of these things in my scientific work. E.g. by formulating my research questions and methods so that they are rationally workable. A necessary task to get work done.

It’s rationality or not-rationality, no? But why expect not-rationality to work? We shouldn’t because reality isn’t chaotic (even if it were, irrational methods wouldn’t work). There exist regularities in reality and so regularity-finding methods (also called “reason”) can work.

Note *can* work, not *must* work because we are fallible (and problems are inevitable.)

The rationalism Chapman is talking about are "attempts to make the mechanics of rationality explicit in order to find optimality guarantees." That involves looking for an escape from fallibility and, ipso facto, rejection of the modest rationality identified by Karl Popper et al.

Yup, just that!

Ah, guarantees and an escape from (rejection of?) fallibility. Hasn’t that been tried many times and don’t we KNOW it leads to disaster? One of Popper’s great leaps (it wasn’t modest) was to show all such attempts tend in the direction of dogma and tyranny.

The widespread rejection of Popper's turn is, I imagine you know, part of the situation. (Bartley, 1990) It's not Popper's accomplishments, but the consequent epistemology, that I label 'modest.'

What would you say is the strongest argument(s) in favour of rejecting fallibilism and seeking guarantees? (Especially given that achieving either would mean *an* end to progress).

Reminds me of this old essay about the popularity of linear models. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ram/art/essay/linear/ … The decision to use an "inaccurate" model is maybe not quite as fuzzy as you are calling circumrational, but the fencing off the places where it breaks down is the same.

I work in astrophysics in the domain where we want to connect nonlinear astrophysical dynamics modelling with the world of observations, which relies on often relatively linear fitting. This is a challenging place to be, as I need to be conversant with the both worlds. ...(1/2)

I like the phrase but I also like “rationalization”, though you may or may not like that fact that that sort of collapses the rationality and the circumrational into one

Oh no. Let's not do this please. There is enough confusion in the world and new words happen to be free.

well the collapsing is on purpose when the word is used this way. some would say it’s a confusion to separate the circumrational from the rational

on this view the properly rational is sort of like a vanishingly thin boundary and all the stuff we really do is circumrational