CriticalRationalismForOli

Context: CriticalRationalism

Some explanation for OliSharpe in response to his essay here

OK. I can go on at length about CR, but let's just give two features which I think are attractive at this point.

1) By accepting that there are no laws or principles of induction, Popper explicitly has to supplement deductive logic with what he calls by the dignified name of "conjecture" but which we can also call "guesswork" or "imagination". This is one of Popper's key moves : to allow that this imaginative step IS part of rationality, rather than distinct from it. Critical Rationalism is (crude oversimplification) a kind of "generate and test". Where the generate is completely open-ended. But it's the whole package that's "rational". Including the wild guesses.

What's nice about this is that it accounts for why two people can both be "rational" and still disagree. That disagreement doesn't need to be a couched as a failure of reason or rationality on either of their parts. You don't need to invoke things like "dialect" or some kind of frame-of-reference to explain or justify the difference.

Rational people faced with the same evidence just can disagree AND THAT'S OK. (At least in an epistemological sense.) It just means that they're making different conjectures.

Of course, faced with disagreement, they should then want to argue to try to figure out why they disagree. This may involved invoking other bits of evidence, new models, inventing experiments etc. The argument is intended not to WIN but to drill down into the subject more fully and hopefully provide them both with a greater understanding.

This brings us to

2) There IS actually a sense of the difference between rational and reasonable which you seem to be looking for. Or rather Popper has shifted the perspective. To be rational is NOT, as some might have it, to have a bunch of beliefs that you've reached through the right kind of inferences. Because there is no "right kind of inference". Instead rationality is a property of entire AGENTS, not individual beliefs. Furthermore it's a DISPOSITIONAL property : to be rational is to have the disposition to correct your conjectured beliefs when faced with the right kinds of criticism.

In the most famous case (of the scientist) the right kind of criticism is falsifying evidence, but CR is broader than just a scientific method, it's also a philosophic method where "criticism" comes in the form of arguments / logical proofs etc. And, in fact, it's even broader than that. CR becomes a kind of "ethic" of not just being open to criticism but actively seeking it. That means looking for the experiments that can falsify your hypothesis or even just the right kind of people to debate with. (Those most likely to challenge your beliefs.)

That's the big attraction for me : CR acknowledges the role that imagination / creativity inevitably has to play in constructing knowledge. And, through this, allows that there can be diversity of opinion WITHIN reason. Furthermore it moves to thinking of rationality as a kind of ethic : a norm we aspire to and judge our behaviour against, but one which can't be naively reduced to a particular algorithm (which would be absurd) or defined by the particular results it expects (which would be closed minded).

If I understand you rightly, CR then becomes very like the "unbounded" notion of "reason" you're looking for. A very broad framework for having productive arguments.

In fact, I sometimes call CR the "lowest energy state" version of epistemology you can have without collapsing into relativism. Basically CR says "you can conjecture anything you like but must be responsive to deductive constraints". If you think of it that way, any more commitments / demands (eg. that conjecture itself has constraints or that there are rules for the inductive step of your reasoning) are pretty much impossible to defend. Eg. "you saw 10 white swans today, that ought to make you more inclined to conjecture no black swans than if you only saw 9." We know that this doesn't work.

OTOH, any less commitment, ie. to relax the requirement to respond to deductive constraints, allows you to hold internally inconsistent beliefs (which is crazy) or be comfortable holding on to beliefs that are incompatible with those of others (relativism)

CR is the minimal model of reasoning that's general enough to cover all the actual cases (even the weird awkward ones) of how we generate knowledge, but still provides a meaningful normative against which we can distinguish rational enquiry from the alternatives.