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#3883·Liberty Fitz-Claridge, 1 day agoIt seems that you've taken the idea of hard to vary as saying that the process of choosing between competing theories is just about measuring how much of this trait they have. One clearly wouldn’t get better explanations from doing that, as it would just be a mechanical way of judging theories.
But this is a misunderstanding of hard to vary, which is simply an outcome of the process of conjecture and criticism. It's not a criterion to be applied before any critical discussion has taken place.
The same goes for other aspects of good explanations, such as depth, accuracy, elegance, reach. These are things we aspire to have, but they are not criteria for judging theories, for which we need no justification.
It seems that you've taken the idea of hard to vary as saying that the process of choosing between competing theories is just about measuring how much of this trait they have. One clearly wouldn’t get better explanations from doing that, as it would just be a mechanical way of judging theories.
Yes, but as I understood Deutsch, this process of choosing happens after one has conjectured and criticized a bunch of explanations. I don’t think he suggests that the application of the HTV criterion makes theories better, only that we should use it to choose between explanations after they have been guessed and improved.
So the process of choosing between already existing explanations really is “just about measuring how much of this trait they have.”