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#3924·Dennis HackethalOP, 7 months 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.
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.”
I think we agree that the conjecturing and criticising of explanations is where the progress happens, and this choice you're saying people make at the end among conjectured theories is (relatively) mechanical. But I would also point out that trying to measure how HTV a theory is is as futile and scientistic as trying to measure moral worth. Yet it's still possible to have meaningful discussions about morality. I can't measure the moral value of murder but I can meaningfully argue it's worse than theft. So I think the claim that "if you can't program it you don't understand it" doesn't apply so universally as #3020 implies.