One obvious approach is to ask them “how did you determine this specific fact yesterday,” and then they launch into a story about chromatography columns and ethidium bromide or whatever.
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Replying to @Meaningness @s_r_constantin
Then instead of trying to turn that story into a tidy morality fable about The Scientific Method, you can take it seriously in its own terms. What specifically *is* the logic whereby that experiment shows protein A regulates protein B.
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Replying to @Meaningness @s_r_constantin
Another thing you can do is to hang out in labs watching scientists do science. Then what you see is “shop work” that is almost perfectly dissimilar to the fables you are taught in HS/undergrad about how science is done.
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Replying to @Meaningness @s_r_constantin
The actual work is mostly improvisational futzing around with materials and equipment, trying different things out, trying to coax them to produce an answer. And when you do that, you run into the “contingencies” Garfinkel enumerates.
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Replying to @Meaningness @s_r_constantin
Phil’s insight was that the contingencies are constraints on the form of a cognitive architecture.
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Replying to @Meaningness @s_r_constantin
E.g. if you assume knowledge consists of datastructures representing fopc wffs, you inevitably hit a combinatorial explosion. So we applied modus tolens, and concluded that knowledge can’t be datastructures or wffs or anything like that. Our program Pengi did fine without them.
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Replying to @Meaningness
ah, the thing where you can't proceduralize a scientist. (or an engineer or mechanic for that matter.) yes, that's quite true.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @Meaningness
"shit, the mysterious phenomenon was due to a difference in the manufacturing process" comes from outside, it's not like you had a preexisting model with a node for the manufacturing process. you don't have a sample space, you have to have "room" to "add stuff from the void".
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Yes, this is a major feature of how and why rationality in general works. Rationality always depends on “closed-world assumptions” (or “small-world assumptions” in statistical parlance) that are actually untrue, but enable rational operation to the extent that they hold.
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Replying to @Meaningness @s_r_constantin
So a major aspect of meta-rationality is opening up the details of the closed-world assumptions and asking how and why and whether they hold, and if altering them in a particular situation might make your rational inference process go better.
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Closed/small world assumptions are closely related to Stanovich’s cognitive decoupling, btw… you have to be able to do this in order to apply technical rationality. And you have to be able to ask “what would be the consequences of relaxing the decoupling?” for meta-rationality.
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