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NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
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Justification through science is about reliability.

There isn't a categorical difference between science and non-scientific sensory experiences.

For the purposes of this question, science can broadly be thought of as the process of refining, testing and expanding our experiences to reach reliable conclusions (thanks to a reliable process).

We can also reach reliable conclusions without explicitly following the scientific method - we have a pretty good idea of when our sensory experiences are and are not reliable (it's unreliable when you're in bed in the middle of the night, when you have certain mental conditions, when you're on drugs, etc., and we also know that memory can be unreliable with respect to significant details of single events). We've figured some of this out through science, and some of it is fairly obvious (dreams seemingly tend to not correspond to anything real in the world outside of our own brains).

Although we also implicitly and informally follow the scientific method in day-to-day life. If you have some food and you observe that you get a stomach ache, you may come up with the hypothesis that said food gave you a stomach ache. You might then create an experiment of sorts, where you test that hypothesis by trying to have the food again. That's pretty much what the scientific method is, it just does that more formally and robustly.

See also: Reliabilism.

What's a good justification?

If your goal is to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, then you can't do much better than a justification of reliability - that's pretty much what reliability is.

I'd also argue many other goals circle back to reliability, because if your beliefs more reliably correspond to reality, you'd be better able to predict the outcomes of your actions, and thus achieve what you try to achieve.

* There's also a cost-benefit tradeoff - for mundane beliefs that have no effect on your life, less reliable justifications (e.g. 1 person said it) may be good enough.

If you get into more metaphysical beliefs like whether there exists a world outside of your own mind, or whether things beyond what we can perceive (e.g. what people might call "supernatural"), you can't directly invoke reliability, because you can't check the reliability (of course you can potentially reject anything for which you don't have a reliable process, but that leaves you potentially unable to evaluate certain claims). But we can invoke other principles and ideas like Occam's razor, explanatory power and coherence (and one can potentially argue for the reliability of those principles).

In any case, there are also other views on what a good justification is, but (at least in my view) that tries to draw some dubious distinctions (e.g. one can conceivably, within certain bounds, measure the reliability of any proposed source of justification, even "internal" ones, but reliabilism is categorised as an "external" source of justification) and it seems to concern itself mostly with abstract considerations, or mentions merely conceivable sources of justification. Meanwhile, I take a much more pragmatic view in focusing on what the actual point of justification is: what is the goal you hope to achieve through justification. More broadly, one might ask what the practical use of epistemology is. And that brings us back to where I started: reliability is focused on the goal of believing as many true things and as few false things as possible. That's the best goal I can find, but others are welcome to argue for a different goal.

Justification through science is about reliability.

There isn't a categorical difference between science and non-scientific sensory experiences.

For the purposes of this question, science can broadly be thought of as the process of refining, testing and expanding our experiences to reach reliable conclusions (thanks to a reliable process).

We can also reach reliable conclusions without explicitly following the scientific method - we have a pretty good idea of when our sensory experiences are and are not reliable (it's unreliable when you're in bed in the middle of the night, when you have certain mental conditions, when you're on drugs, etc., and we also know that memory can be unreliable with respect to significant details of single events). We've figured some of this out through science, and some of it is fairly obvious (dreams seemingly tend to not correspond to anything real in the world outside of our own brains).

Although we also implicitly and informally follow the scientific method in day-to-day life. If you have some food and you observe that you get a stomach ache, you may come up with the hypothesis that said food gave you a stomach ache. You might then create an experiment of sorts, where you test that hypothesis by trying to have the food again. That's pretty much what the scientific method is, it just does that more formally and robustly.

See also: Reliabilism.

What's a good justification?

If your goal is to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, then you can't do much better than a justification of reliability - that's pretty much what reliability is.

I'd also argue many other goals circle back to reliability, because if your beliefs more reliably correspond to reality, you'd be better able to predict the outcomes of your actions, and thus achieve what you try to achieve.

* There's also a cost-benefit tradeoff - for mundane beliefs that have no effect on your life, less reliable justifications (e.g. 1 person said it) may be good enough.

If you get into more metaphysical beliefs like whether there exists a world outside of your own mind, or whether things beyond what we can perceive (e.g. what people might call "supernatural"), you can't directly invoke reliability, because you can't check the reliability (of course you can potentially reject anything for which you don't have a reliable process, but that leaves you potentially unable to evaluate certain claims). But we can invoke other principles and ideas like Occam's razor, explanatory power and coherence (and one can potentially argue for the reliability of those principles).

In any case, there are also other views on what a good justification is, but (at least in my view) that tries to draw some dubious distinctions and seems to concern itself mostly with abstract considerations, or mentions conceivable sources of justification. Meanwhile, I take a much more pragmatic view in focusing on what the actual point of justification is: what is the goal you hope to achieve through justification. More broadly, one might ask what the practical use of epistemology is. And that brings us back to where I started: reliability is focused on the goal of believing as many true things and as few false things as possible. That's the best goal I can find, but others are welcome to argue for a different goal.

Justification through science is about reliability.

There isn't a categorical difference between science and non-scientific sensory experiences.

For the purposes of this question, science can broadly be thought of as the process of refining, testing and expanding our experiences to reach reliable conclusions (thanks to a reliable process).

We can also reach reliable conclusions without explicitly following the scientific method - we have a pretty good idea of when our sensory experiences are and are not reliable (it's unreliable when you're in bed in the middle of the night, when you have certain mental conditions, when you're on drugs, etc., and we also know that memory can be unreliable with respect to significant details of single events). We've figured some of this out through science, and some of it is fairly obvious (dreams seemingly tend to not correspond to anything real in the world outside of our own brains).

Although we also implicitly and informally follow the scientific method in day-to-day life. If you have some food and you observe that you get a stomach ache, you may come up with the hypothesis that said food gave you a stomach ache. You might then create an experiment of sorts, where you test that hypothesis by trying to have the food again. That's pretty much what the scientific method is, it just does that more formally and robustly.

See also: Reliabilism.

What's a good justification?

If your goal is to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, then you can't do much better than a justification of reliability - that's pretty much what reliability is.

I'd also argue many other goals circle back to reliability, because if your beliefs more reliably correspond to reality, you'd be better able to predict the outcomes of your actions, and thus achieve what you try to achieve.

* There's also a cost-benefit tradeoff - for mundane beliefs that have no effect on your life, less reliable justifications (e.g. 1 person said it) may be good enough.

If you get into more metaphysical beliefs like whether there exists a world outside of your own mind, or whether things beyond what we can perceive (e.g. what people might call "supernatural"), you can't directly invoke reliability, because you can't check the reliability (of course you can potentially reject anything for which you don't have a reliable process, but that leaves you potentially unable to evaluate certain claims). But we can invoke other principles and ideas like Occam's razor, explanatory power and coherence (and one can potentially argue for the reliability of those principles).

In any case, there are also other views on what a good justification is, but (at least in my view) that tries to draw some dubious distinctions (e.g. one can conceivably, within certain bounds, measure the reliability of any proposed source of justification, even "internal" ones, but reliabilism is categorised as an "external" source of justification) and it seems to concern itself mostly with abstract considerations, or mentions merely conceivable sources of justification. Meanwhile, I take a much more pragmatic view in focusing on what the actual point of justification is: what is the goal you hope to achieve through justification. More broadly, one might ask what the practical use of epistemology is. And that brings us back to where I started: reliability is focused on the goal of believing as many true things and as few false things as possible. That's the best goal I can find, but others are welcome to argue for a different goal.

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NotThatGuy
NotThatGuy
  • 10.9k
  • 1
  • 21
  • 43

Justification through science is about reliability.

There isn't a categorical difference between science and non-scientific sensory experiences.

For the purposes of this question, science can broadly be thought of as the process of refining, testing and expanding our experiences to reach reliable conclusions (thanks to a reliable process).

We can also reach reliable conclusions without explicitly following the scientific method - we have a pretty good idea of when our sensory experiences are and are not reliable (it's unreliable when you're in bed in the middle of the night, when you have certain mental conditions, when you're on drugs, etc., and we also know that memory can be unreliable with respect to significant details of single events). We've figured some of this out through science, and some of it is fairly obvious (dreams seemingly tend to not correspond to anything real in the world outside of our own brains).

Although we also implicitly and informally follow the scientific method in day-to-day life. If you have some food and you observe that you get a stomach ache, you may come up with the hypothesis that said food gave you a stomach ache. You might then create an experiment of sorts, where you test that hypothesis by trying to have the food again. That's pretty much what the scientific method is, it just does that more formally and robustly.

See also: Reliabilism.

What's a good justification?

If your goal is to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible, then you can't do much better than a justification of reliability - that's pretty much what reliability is.

I'd also argue many other goals circle back to reliability, because if your beliefs more reliably correspond to reality, you'd be better able to predict the outcomes of your actions, and thus achieve what you try to achieve.

* There's also a cost-benefit tradeoff - for mundane beliefs that have no effect on your life, less reliable justifications (e.g. 1 person said it) may be good enough.

If you get into more metaphysical beliefs like whether there exists a world outside of your own mind, or whether things beyond what we can perceive (e.g. what people might call "supernatural"), you can't directly invoke reliability, because you can't check the reliability (of course you can potentially reject anything for which you don't have a reliable process, but that leaves you potentially unable to evaluate certain claims). But we can invoke other principles and ideas like Occam's razor, explanatory power and coherence (and one can potentially argue for the reliability of those principles).

In any case, there are also other views on what a good justification is, but (at least in my view) that tries to draw some dubious distinctions and seems to concern itself mostly with abstract considerations, or mentions conceivable sources of justification. Meanwhile, I take a much more pragmatic view in focusing on what the actual point of justification is: what is the goal you hope to achieve through justification. More broadly, one might ask what the practical use of epistemology is. And that brings us back to where I started: reliability is focused on the goal of believing as many true things and as few false things as possible. That's the best goal I can find, but others are welcome to argue for a different goal.