Saturday, November 10, 2007

Pure Copernican epistemologies

There are multiple people in the room, including you, who (even after discussion of the objective facts) all have different honest ("Experience") beliefs. You have to make a correct decision, based on those beliefs. Consider four algorithms to make the decision.

1. Always base your decision on your own ("Experience") beliefs.

2. Always go with the beliefs of whoever you judge has the most "common sense" in the room (which, by staggering coincidence, happens to be you.)

3. Always go with the beliefs of whoever's Social Security Number is 987-65-4320 (which, by staggering coincidence, happens to be your own Social Security Number.)

4. Everyone takes some sort of Good Decision-Making Test that measures your general GDM (Good Decision-Making) ability.

The first two are clearly not "Copernican Epistemologies", as they posit as axioms that you have 'privileged access' to truth. If you wish to adopt a purely Copernican Epistemology, you would reject (1) and (2). Would you have a preference between (3) and (4)? Both (3) and (4), on the face, Copernican. But the decision of what algorithm to choose make your current decision is, itself, a decision! If you apply a Copernican process to that decision, and so on recursively, you would (in theory) eventually come back to some small set of consistent axioms, and would reject (3).

I personally believe that a normative "Theory of Everything" epistemology would have to be purely Copernican, rather than partially Ptolemaic. To elaborate, it would have to be an epistemology where:
  1. There are a relatively small set of axioms (for example, there is no room for axioms that directly reference Social Security Numbers)
  2. None of these axioms explicitly reference yourself as a privileged source of knowledge, with the exception that I would allow some privileged access to your own current consciousness, and your own current thoughts and beliefs. (You do not have privileged access to your past feelings, thoughts, and beliefs; you have to infer those from your current thoughts and beliefs, like everyone else.) To be clear, this privileged access would not be of the form "I have privileged knowledge that my belief about X is correct," but rather, of the form "I have privileged knowledge that I know that 'I believe X is correct.' In contrast, I don't know whether Joe believes that 'X is correct'; he says he does, but for all I know, he's deliberately lying."

1 comment:

Michael Vassar said...

I'm not sure that one can make observer independent and (purely Copernican) theories.
Reference frame dependence and subjection to (subjective?) wavefunction collapse seem fundamental.