Hard to Vary or Hardly Usable?
Showing only those parts of the discussion that lead to #3724.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Deutsch’s stance in my own words:
The distinguishing characteristic between rationality and irrationality is that rationality is the search for good explanations. All progress comes from the search for good explanations. So the distinction between good vs bad explanations is epistemologically fundamental.
A good explanation is hard to vary “while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” (BoI chapter 1 glossary.) A bad explanation is easy to vary.
For example, the Persephone myth as an explanation of the seasons is easy to change without impacting its ability to explain the seasons. You could arbitrarily replace Persephone and other characters and the explanation would still ‘work’. The axis-tilt explanation of the earth, on the other hand, is hard to change without breaking it. You can’t just replace the axis with something else, say.
The quality of a theory is a matter of degrees. The harder it is to change a theory, the better that theory is. When deciding which explanation to adopt, we should “choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.” (BoI chatper 9; see similar remark in chapter 8.)
From my article:
[T]he assignment of positive values enables self-coercion: if I have a ‘good’ explanation worth 500 points, and a criticism worth only 100 points, Deutsch’s epistemology (presumably) says to adopt the explanation even though it has a pending criticism. After all, we’re still 400 in the black! But according to the epistemology of Taking Children Seriously, a parenting philosophy Deutsch cofounded before writing The Beginning of Infinity, acting on an idea that has pending criticisms is the definition of self-coercion. Such an act is irrational and incompatible with his view that rationality is fun in the sense that rationality means unanimous consent between explicit, inexplicit, unconscious, and any other type of idea in one’s mind.
In short, does the search for good explanations enable self-coercion and contradict TCS?