How Does Veritula Work?
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Decision-Making on Veritula
Expanding on #2112…
If an idea has no pending criticisms, it’s rational to adopt it and irrational to reject it. What reason could you have to reject it? If it has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it have been suggested or 2) all suggested reasons have been addressed already.
If an idea does have pending criticisms, it’s irrational to adopt it and rational to reject it – by reference to those criticisms. What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?
What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt it anyway?
Maybe the criticisms aren’t very good.
Then you counter-criticize them for whatever you think they lack (which should be easy if they really aren’t good), thus addressing them and restoring the idea.
If [an idea] has no pending criticisms, then either 1) no reasons to reject it have been suggested …
If no one has even tried to criticize the idea, its adoption seems premature. (This is a modification of Kieren’s view.)
That would itself be a criticism, but it would lead to an infinite regress: any leaf of the discussion tree would always get one criticism claiming that its advocacy is premature. But then the criticism would become the new leaf and would thus have to be criticized for the same reason, and so would every subsequent criticism, forever and ever.
What reason could you have to ignore the pending criticisms and adopt [the criticized idea] anyway?
Maybe the criticisms aren’t decisive.
If you don’t have any counter-criticisms, how could the criticisms not be decisive?
Popper didn’t say to correct some errors while ignoring others for no reason. He spoke of error correction, period.
This criticism reminds me of a passage in Objective Knowledge, where Popper says some people defend ugly theories by claiming they’re tiny, like people do with ugly babies. Just because (you think) a criticism is tiny doesn’t mean it’s not ugly.