Hard to Vary or Hardly Usable?
Showing only those parts of the discussion that lead to #3926 and its comments.
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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 chapter 9; see similar remark in chapter 8.)
From my article:
Isn’t the assignment of positive scores, of positive reasons to prefer one theory over another, a kind of justificationism? Deutsch criticizes justificationism throughout The Beginning of Infinity, but isn’t an endorsement of a theory as ‘good’ a kind of justification?
@liberty-fitz-claridge says (#3885) it’d be implausible for HTV to be justificationist since that would contradict the rest of Deutsch’s anti-justificationist philosophy.
I don’t think that alone means my interpretation of HTV is implausible. We’re bound to find contradictions eventually. In a good book like BoI, they’re just rare, so when we do find them, they go against the bulk of the philosophy.