We discuss

• Ben's early reflections on Abigail Shrier's book Bad Therapy
• Why did Popper feel the need to answer this particular "what is" question?
• Can asking "what is truth" be a demogogic and bad-faith question?
• The correspondence theory of truth vs The pragmatic theory of truth vs The coherence theory of truth
• Alfred Tarski's formalization of the correspondence theory of truth
• Are there problems with the correspondence theory?
• The disagreement between Vaden and Deutsch on truth

References

• Daniel Bonevac on the Correspondence theory of truth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlG_VaN1LHQ
  
• Tarki's 1944 paper on the semantic conception of truth
• Tarki's 1933 paper "On the concept of truth in formalized languages"
• Deutsch's 2022 talk on truth: Musings about Truth # Socials
• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

It would be both useful, coherent, and correspond to our happiness if you signed up for our patreon or discord. Hit us up at incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Support Increments

In one corner, we have the estimable Sir Isaac Newton and Roger Coates (and of course Andre the Giant, upon whose shoulders they are standing), and in the other, we have Bishop Berkeley and Ernst Mach, looking to throw down at the speed of sound. Berkeley can't get Newton and his forces out of his head (literally), and boy oh boy is the fight ever on.

We discuss

• How should teachers address the "students using ChatGPT to write their essay" problem? Can we learn a bit from Stalin here?
• Is Ben basically Gandhi? (Answer: Yes of course)
• How can one be both an idealist and an empiricist?
• WTF is a 'force'???
• Instrumentalism and Essentialism
• The history of the debate between Berkeley and Newton
• The lifelong feud between Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzman
• What's the difference between essences and unobservables?
• Is Mach a filthy plagiarist?
• Who won the essentialism vs instrumentalism debate? (Answer: Neither side won. Popper won.)
  

References

• Go amuse yourselves and watch some videos of Newton's spinning bucket thought experiment.
• Boltzmanns Atom: The Great Debate That Launched A Revolution In Physics

Quotes

Everybody who reads this list of twenty-one theses must be struck by their modernity. They are surprisingly similar, especially in the criticism of Newton, to the philosophy of physics which Ernst Mach taught for many years in the conviction that it was new and revolutionary; in which he was followed by, for example, Joseph Petzold; and which had an immense influence on modern physics, especially on the Theory of Relativity.

• Popper, C&R Chapter 6

(20) A general practical result—which I propose to call ‘Berkeley’s razor’—of this analysis of physics allows us a-priori to eliminate from physical science all essentialist explanations. If they have a mathematical and a predictive content they may be admitted qua mathematical hypotheses (while their essentialist interpretation is eliminated). If not, they may be ruled out altogether. This razor is sharper than Ockham’s: all entities are ruled out except those which are perceived.

• Popper, C&R Chapter 6

No attempt was made to show how or why the forces acted, but gravitation being taken as due to a mere "force", speculators thought themselves at liberty to imagine any number of forces, attractive or repulsive, or alternating, varying as the distance,[4] or the square, cube, or higher power of the distance, etc. At last, Ruđer Bošković[5] got rid of atoms altogether, by supposing them to be the mere centre of forces exerted by a position or point only, where nothing existed but the power of exerting a force.[6]

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imponderable_fluid

Mach's antipathy to theorizing and to the invocation of "metaphysical" and therefore unprovable notions led him to some extreme opinions. In The Conservation of Energy he remarks: "We say now that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen, but this hydrogen and oxygen are merely thoughts or names which, at the sight of water, we keep ready to describe phenomena which are not present but which will appear again whenever, as we say, we decompose water.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

In Mach's world, there was to be no such thing as "explaining" in the way scientists had always understood it. Mach even went so far as to argue that the traditional notion of cause and effect-that kicking a rock makes it move, that heating a gas makes it expand —was presumptuous and therefore to be denied scientific status.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

But it was not always so. Well into the latter half of the 19th century, most scientists saw their essential task as the measurement and codification of phenomena they could investigate directly: the passage of sound waves through air, the expansion of gas when heated, the conversion of heat to motive power in a steam engine. A scientific law was a quantitative relationship between one observable phenomenon and another.

• David Lindley, Boltzmann's Atom

Errata

• Vaden incorrectly said this that this essay was referenced in Mach's wikipedia page. Wrong! Fool! It was Berkeley's wiki page # Socials
• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Do you have any fluids you'd like us to ponder? Send a sample over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

Support Increments

We discuss

• Deontology vs consquentialism vs virtue ethics
• Kant's Categorical Imperative
• Kant's contributions to cosmology and politics
• Kant as a defender of the enlightenment
• Romanticism vs (German) idealism vs critical rationalism
• Kant's cosmology and cosmogony
• Kant's antimony and his proofs that the universe is both finite and infinite in time
• Kant's Copernican revolution and transcendental idealism
• Kant's morality
• Why Popper admired Kant so much, and why he compares him to Socrates

Quotes

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! "Have courage to use your own understanding!" --that is the motto of enlightenment.

• An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment? (Translated by Ted Humphrey, Hackett Publishing, 1992)

(Alternate translation from Popper: Enlightenment is the emancipation of man from a state of self-imposed tutelage . . . of incapacity to use his own intelligence without external guidance. Such a state of tutelage I call ‘self-imposed’ if it is due, not to lack of intelligence, but to lack of courage or determination to use one’s own intelligence without the help of a leader. Sapere aude! Dare to use your own intelligence! This is the battle-cry of the Enlightenment.)

- C&R, Chap 6

What lesson did Kant draw from these bewildering antinomies? He concluded that our ideas of space and time are inapplicable to the universe as a whole. We can, of course, apply the ideas of space and time to ordinary physical things and physical events. But space and time themselves are neither things nor events: they cannot even be observed: they are more elusive. They are a kind of framework for things and events: something like a system of pigeon-holes, or a filing system, for observations. Space and time are not part of the real empir- ical world of things and events, but rather part of our mental outfit, our apparatus for grasping this world. Their proper use is as instruments of observation: in observing any event we locate it, as a rule, immediately and intuitively in an order of space and time. Thus space and time may be described as a frame of reference which is not based upon experience but intuitively used in experience, and properly applicable to experience. This is why we get into trouble if we misapply the ideas of space and time by using them in a field which transcends all possible experience—as we did in our two proofs about the universe as a whole.
...
To the view which I have just outlined Kant chose to give the ugly and doubly misleading name ‘Transcendental Idealism’. He soon regretted this choice, for it made people believe that he was an idealist in the sense of denying the reality of physical things: that he declared physical things to be mere ideas. Kant hastened to explain that he had only denied that space and time are empirical and real — empirical and real in the sense in which physical things and events are empirical and real. But in vain did he protest. His difficult style sealed his fate: he was to be revered as the father of German Idealism. I suggest that it is time to put this right.
- C&R, Chap 6

Kant believed in the Enlightenment. He was its last great defender. I realize that this is not the usual view. While I see Kant as the defender of the Enlightenment, he is more often taken as the founder of the school which destroyed it—of the Romantic School of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. I contend that these two interpretations are incompatible.

Fichte, and later Hegel, tried to appropriate Kant as the founder of their school. But Kant lived long enough to reject the persistent advances of Fichte, who proclaimed himself Kant’s successor and heir. In A Public Declaration Concerning Fichte, which is too little known, Kant wrote: ‘May God protect us from our friends. . . . For there are fraudulent and perfidious so-called friends who are scheming for our ruin while speaking the language of good-will.’
- C&R, Chap 6

As Kant puts it, Copernicus, finding that no progress was being made with the theory of the revolving heavens, broke the deadlock by turning the tables, as it were: he assumed that it is not the heavens which revolve while we the observers stand still, but that we the observers revolve while the heavens stand still. In a similar way, Kant says, the problem of scientific knowledge is to be solved — the problem how an exact science, such as Newtonian theory, is possible, and how it could ever have been found. We must give up the view that we are passive observers, waiting for nature to impress its regularity upon us. Instead we must adopt the view that in digesting our sense-data we actively impress the order and the laws of our intellect upon them. Our cosmos bears the imprint of our minds.
- C&R, Chap 6

From Kant the cosmologist, the philosopher of knowledge and of science, I now turn to Kant the moralist. I do not know whether it has been noticed before that the fundamental idea of Kant’s ethics amounts to another Copernican Revolution, analogous in every respect to the one I have described. For Kant makes man the lawgiver of morality just as he makes him the lawgiver of nature. And in doing so he gives back to man his central place both in his moral and in his physical universe. Kant humanized ethics, as he had humanized science.
...
Kant’s Copernican Revolution in the field of ethics is contained in his doctrine of autonomy—the doctrine that we cannot accept the command of an authority, however exalted, as the ultimate basis of ethics. For whenever we are faced with a command by an authority, it is our responsibility to judge whether this command is moral or immoral. The authority may have power to enforce its commands, and we may be powerless to resist. But unless we are physically prevented from choosing the responsibility remains ours. It is our decision whether to obey a command, whether to accept authority.
- C&R, Chap 6

Stepping back further to get a still more distant view of Kant’s historical role, we may compare him with Socrates. Both were accused of perverting the state religion, and of corrupting the minds of the young. Both denied the charge; and both stood up for freedom of thought. Freedom meant more to them than absence of constraint; it was for both a way of life.
...
To this Socratic idea of self-sufficiency, which forms part of our western heritage, Kant has given a new meaning in the fields of both knowledge and morals. And he has added to it further the idea of a community of free men—of all men. For he has shown that every man is free; not because he is born free, but because he is born with the burden of responsibility for free decision.

- C&R, Chap 6

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Become a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Follow the Kantian Imperative: Stop masturbating and/or/while getting your hair cut, and start sending emails over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Support Increments

(Note: Early listeners of this episode have commented that this one is a bit hard to follow - highly suggest reading the text to compensate for our many confusing digressions. Our bad, our bad).

We discuss

• Are there any benefits of being bilingual?
• Popper's attack on the idea of national self-determination
• Popper's second thesis: that out own free world is by far the best society thus far
• Reductions in poverty, unemployment, sickness, pain, cruelty, slavery, discrimination, class differences
• Popper's third thesis: The relation of progress to war
• Whether Popper was factually correct about his claim that democracies do not wage wars of aggression
• Self-accusation: A unique feature to Western societies
• Popper's fourth thesis about the power of ideas
• And his fifth thesis that truth is hard to come by

References

• Conjectures and Refutations
• Definition of self-determination from Cornell Law School
• The UN Charter
• Wilson's 14 Points

Quotes

The absurdity of the communist faith is manifest. Appealing to the belief in human freedom, it has produced a system of oppression without parallel in history.

But the nationalist faith is equally absurd. I am not alluding here to Hitler’s racial myth. What I have in mind is, rather, an alleged natural right of man— the alleged right of a nation to self-determination. That even a great humanitarian and liberal like Masaryk could uphold this absurd- ity as one of the natural rights of man is a sobering thought. It suffices to shake one’s faith in the wisdom of philosopher kings, and it should be contemplated by all who think that we are clever but wicked rather than good but stupid. For the utter absurdity of the principle of national self-determination must be plain to anybody who devotes a moment’s effort to criticizing it. The principle amounts to the demand that each state should be a nation-state: that it should be confined within a natural border, and that this border should coincide with the location of an ethnic group; so that it should be the ethnic group, the ‘nation’, which should determine and protect the natural limits of the state.

But nation-states of this kind do not exist. Even Iceland—the only exception I can think of—is only an apparent exception to this rule. For its limits are determined, not by its ethnic group, but by the North Atlantic—just as they are protected, not by the Icelandic nation, but by the North Atlantic Treaty. Nation-states do not exist, simply because the so-called ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’ of which the nationalists dream do not exist. There are no, or hardly any, homogenous ethnic groups long settled in countries with natural borders. Ethnic and linguistic groups (dialects often amount to linguistic barriers) are closely intermingled everywhere. Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia was founded upon the principle of national self-determination. But as soon as it was founded, the Slovaks demanded, in the name of this principle, to be free from Czech domination; and ultimately it was destroyed by its German minority, in the name of the same principle. Similar situations have arisen in practically every case in which the principle of national self- determination has been applied to fixing the borders of a new state: in Ireland, in India, in Israel, in Yugoslavia.

There are ethnic minorities everywhere. The proper aim cannot be to ‘liberate’ all of them; rather, it must be to protect all of them. The oppression of national groups is a great evil; but national self-determination is not a feasible remedy. Moreover, Britain, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland, are four obvious examples of states which in many ways violate the nationality principle. Instead of having its borders determined by one settled group, each of them has man- aged to unite a variety of ethnic groups. So the problem does not seem insoluble.

• C&R, Chapter 19

How anybody who had the slightest knowledge of European history, of the shifting and mixing of all kinds of tribes, of the countless waves of peoples who had come forth from their original Asian habitat and split up and mingled when reaching the maze of peninsulas called the European continent, how anybody who knew this could ever have put forward such an inapplicable principle, is hard to understand.

• Open Society, Page 355

The nationalist religion is strong. Many are ready to die for it, fer- vently believing that it is morally good, and factually true. But they are mistaken; just as mistaken as their communist bedfellows. Few creeds have created more hatred, cruelty, and senseless suffering than the belief in the righteousness of the nationality principle; and yet it is still widely believed that this principle will help to alleviate the misery of national oppression. My optimism is a little shaken, I admit, when I look at the near-unanimity with which this principle is still accepted, even today, without any hesitation, without any doubt—even by those whose political interests are clearly opposed to it.

• C&R, Chapter 19

In spite of our great and serious troubles, and in spite of the fact that ours is surely not the best possible society, I assert that our own free world is by far the best society which has come into existence during the course of human history.

• C&R, Chapter 19

But before examining these facts more closely, I wish to stress that I am very much alive to other facts also. Power still corrupts, even in our world. Civil servants still behave at times like uncivil masters. Pocket dictators still abound; and a normally intelligent man seeking medical advice must be prepared to be treated as a rather tiresome type of imbecile, if he betrays an intelligent interest—that is, a critical interest—in his physical condition.

• C&R, Chapter 19

I have in mind the standards and values which have come down to us through Christianity from Greece and from the Holy Land; from Socrates, and from the Old and New Testaments.

• C&R, Chapter 19

My third thesis is that since the time of the Boer War, none of the democratic governments of the free world has been in a position to wage a war of aggression. No democratic government would be united upon the issue, because they would not have the nation united behind them. Aggressive war has become almost a moral impossibility.

• C&R, Chapter 19

I believe that it is most important to say what the free world has achieved. For we have become unduly sceptical about ourselves. We are suspicious of anything like self-righteousness, and we find self-praise unpalatable. One of the great things we have learned is not only to be tolerant of others, but to ask ourselves seriously whether the other fellow is not perhaps in the right, and altogether the better man. We have learned the fundamental moral truth that nobody should be judge in his own cause. This, no doubt, is a symptom of a certain moral maturity; yet one may learn a lesson too well. Having discovered the sin of self-righteousness, we have fallen into its stereotyped inversion: into a stereotyped pose of self-depreciation, of inverted smugness. Having learned that one should not be judge in one’s own cause, we are tempted to become advocates for our opponents. Thus we become blind to our own achievements. But this tendency must be resisted.

• C&R, Chapter 19

Thus we learnt not only to tolerate beliefs that differ from ours, but to respect them and the men who sincerely held them. But this means that we slowly began to differentiate between sincerity and dogmatic stub- bornness or laziness, and to recognize the great truth that truth is not manifest, not plainly visible to all who ardently want to see it, but hard to come by. And we learnt that we must not draw authoritarian conclu- sions from this great truth but, on the contrary, suspect all those who claim that they are authorized to teach the truth.

• C&R, Chapter 19 # Socials
• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us revoke the UN charter and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

Form a nation and liberate yo' selves over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Support Increments

We discuss

• Thoughts on the recent Trump assasination attempt
• How can Popper be an optimist with prophesying about the future?
• The scarcity value of optimism
• Russell's view that our intellectual development has outrun our moral development
• Relationship of this view to the orthogonality thesis
• Popper's competing view that our troubles arise because we are good but stupid
• How much can incentives compel us to do bad things?
• How easy it for humans to really be led by the nose
• Ben's experience during the summer of 2020

References

• Conjectures and Refutations
• Orthogonality thesis
• Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt
• Adam Smith's thought experiment about losing a pinky
• Radiolab episode, "The Bad Show"

Quotes

Now I come to the word ‘Optimist’. First let me make it quite clear that if I call myself an optimist, I do not wish to suggest that I know anything about the future. I do not wish to pose as a prophet, least of all as a historical prophet. On the contrary, I have for many years tried to defend the view that historical prophecy is a kind of quackery. I do not believe in historical laws, and I disbelieve especially in anything like a law of progress. In fact, I believe that it is much easier for us to regress than to progress.

Though I believe all this, I think that I may fairly describe myself as an optimist. For my optimism lies entirely in my interpretation of the present and the immediate past. It lies in my strongly appreciative view of our own time. And whatever you might think about this optimism you will have to admit that it has a scarcity value. In fact the wailings of the pessimists have become somewhat monotonous. No doubt there is much in our world about which we can rightly complain if only we give our mind to it; and no doubt it is sometimes most important to find out what is wrong with us. But I think that the other side of the story might also get a hearing.

And whatever you might think about this optimism you will have to admit that it has a scarcity value. In fact the wailings of the pessimists have become somewhat monotonous. No doubt there is much in our world about which we can rightly complain if only we give our mind to it; and no doubt it is sometimes most important to find out what is wrong with us. But I think that the other side of the story might also get a hearing.

We have become very clever, according to Russell, indeed too clever. We can make lots of wonderful gadgets, including television, high-speed rockets, and an atom bomb, or a thermonuclear bomb, if you prefer. But we have not been able to achieve that moral and political growth and maturity which alone could safely direct and control the uses to which we put our tremendous intellectual powers. This is why we now find ourselves in mortal danger. Our evil national pride has prevented us from achieving the world-state in time.To put this view in a nutshell: we are clever, perhaps too clever, but we are also wicked; and this mixture of cleverness and wickedness lies at the root of our troubles.

My first thesis is this. We are good, perhaps a little too good, but we are also a little stupid; and it is this mixture of goodness and stupidity which lies at the root of our troubles.

The main troubles of our time—and I do not deny that we live in troubled times—are not due to our moral wickedness, but, on the contrary, to our often misguided moral enthusiasm: to our anxiety to better the world we live in. Our wars are fundamentally religious wars; they are wars between competing theories of how to establish a better world. And our moral enthusiasm is often misguided, because we fail to realize that our moral principles, which are sure to be over-simple, are often difficult to apply to the complex human and political situations to which we feel bound to apply them.

(All Popper)

“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
- EO Wilson

Socials

• Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani
• Come join our discord server! DM us on twitter or send us an email to get a supersecret link
• Help us calibrate our credences and get exclusive bonus content by becoming a patreon subscriber here. Or give us one-time cash donations to help cover our lack of cash donations here.
• Click dem like buttons on youtube

What do Benny Chugg and Adolf Eichmann have in common? I mean, what don't they have in common? Tell us over at incrementspodcast@gmail.com.

Support Increments

We discuss:

• Are there philosophical problems?
• Why are scientific disciplines divided as they are?
• How much of philosophy is meaningless pseudo-babble? (Hint: Not none)
• Wittgenstein's background and feud between him and Popper
• Wittgenstein 1 and 2 (pre and post Tractatus)
• The danger of philosophical inbreeding
• Two of Popper's examples of philosophical problems: 1. Plato and the Crisis in Early Greek Atomism 2. Immanuel Kant's Problem of Knowledge.
• Musica universalis
• The Problem of Change
• How is knowledge possible?
  

Quotes

My first thesis is that every philosophy, and especially every philosophical ‘school’, is liable to degenerate in such a way that its problems become practically indistinguishable from pseudo-problems, and its cant, accordingly, practically indistinguishable from meaningless babble. This, I shall try to show, is a consequence of philosophical inbreeding. The degeneration of philosophical schools in its turn is the consequence of the mistaken belief that one can philosophize without having been compelled to philosophize by problems which arise outside philosophy—in mathematics, for example, or in cosmology, or in politics, or in religion, or in social life. In other words my first thesis is this. Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in urgent problems outside philosophy, and they die if these roots decay.

C&R p.95

His question, we now know, or believe we know, should have been: ‘How are successful conjectures possible?’ And our answer, in the spirit of his Copernican Revolution, might, I suggest, be something like this: Because, as you said, we are not passive receptors of sense data, but active organisms. Because we react to our environment not always merely instinctively, but sometimes consciously and freely. Because we can invent myths, stories, theories; because we have a thirst for explanation, an insatiable curiosity, a wish to know. Because we not only invent stories and theories, but try them out and see whether they work and how they work. Because by a great effort, by trying hard and making many mistakes, we may sometimes, if we are lucky, succeed in hitting upon a story, an explanation, which ‘saves the phenomena’; perhaps by making up a myth about ‘invisibles’, such as atoms or gravitational forces, which explain the visible. Because knowledge is an adventure of ideas.

C&R p.128

If you were to threaten us with a common household object, what would it be? Tell us at incrementspodcast@gmail.com, or on twitter: @VadenMasrani, @BennyChugg, @IncrementsPod.

Support Increments

Support Increments